French Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty Research Articles

The Chiasm: The Inverse Parallel of Le Corbusier

The “axis” is ubiquitous in Le Corbusier’s architectural oeuvre. “The Chiasm: The Inverse Parallel of Le Corbusier” examines the concept of the axis in the essays, “Architecture, Pure Creation of the Mind,” and “Architecture, The Illusion of the Plan,” published in Vers une architecture (1923). Le Corbusier writes: “…a sense of the harmonious that gives rise to a resonance…” and “…the trace of an indefinable absolute preexisting at the core of our being.” And decisively, “This must be the axis along which man is organized…”. The axis Le Corbusier described is, in fact, a chiastic device he employed in his writings, drawings and architecture. Chiasmus, conceptually defined, is the “inverted repetition of grammatical structure.” Inversion, as two sides of the axis, identifies representations of things related and simultaneously different. The twentieth century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty identifies the chiasm as a concept to describe the body as sensible and sentient, a reflection in relation to the self, others, and the perceived world. Merleau-Ponty uses the chiasm to clarify reversibility and the phenomenological experience. Merleau-Ponty’s theories of chiastic inversion substantiate the chiastic structure that supports Le Corbusier’s ideology and his search for a harmonious milieu that is based in the axis.

The Mental State of Noise

What is the influence of music on the brain? And in what cases can this influence cause dysfunctioning? Among the different examples analyzed by Oliver Sacks, one is particularly significant: the phenomenon of synesthesia. Synesthesia is connected to having an extra one that associates different kinds of sensory information, music, and color. It can sometimes transform hearing music as a painful experience, transforming it into a pure literal meaning – to feel together – the secret condition for all sensations? This hypothesis is examined by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. After all, Wagner was subject to synesthetic syndromes.

Topological Vision: The Artistic Thinking of Shigeru Onishi

Abstract This article examines the work of the Japanese mathematician and photographer Shigeru Onishi (1928–1994) and his topologically inspired photographic experiments. It considers how his painterly play with emulsion and coloration is a visual exploration of questions of process and continuous transformation and how these experiments can be understood in relation to more general discussions of mathematical and artistic “ways of knowing.” Building on ideas introduced by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his work on late Paul Cézanne, the article introduces the concept of topological vision to describe and account for a particular way of seeing that considers the continual coming-into-being of a photographic motif.

The Perpetuation of Caste: An Exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s Classic Text—Humanism and Terror—to Elaborate Buried Possibilities in the Thought of Ambedkar

In our investigation into the persistence of caste, we attempt to build a preliminary framework of analysis to set the stage for a reading of Ambedkar’s posthumously published, unfinished manuscript, Buddha or Karl Marx. We see an uncanny resemblance between Ambedkar’s mid-twentieth century context in the newly independent democratic society of post-colonial India and that of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s post-Second World War Western European context and his intriguing attempt to justify communist violence. Ultimately, we argue that although one cannot use one context to understand the other on how to realise a communist revolution within a democratic, industrial capitalist society, there are lessons to be learned from both with regard to problems in the philosophy of history, historical time, and epochal shifts. The ultimate question is whether a new society that has no precedent in either the West or the East and everything in between is imaginable. Ultimately this article sets up the possibility to read Ambedkar’s text while returning to Marx’s (1990) Capital Vol. 1 itself, particularly on the ‘primitive accumulation’. Then we can be in a position to philosophise in the margins and beyond where Ambedkar leaves off on his brief but brilliant essay, Buddha or Karl Marx.

Human Movement: In Search of Borderlands Between Philosophy and Physics

In this essay, we adopt a theory of behavior developed by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in an attempt to find common ground between philosophy and physics. We look for ways to reconcile matter with meaning, physical motion with the principles of ethics, body with mind. We proceed in three steps, first by providing a review of Merleau-Ponty’s theory; second by showing how ethical behavior is constrained and shaped by factors found in physics, chemistry, and biology; and, finally, by describing how physical motion is affected by factors that transcend the laws of classical physics. For the latter purpose, we accept a theory of parametric control of movements with spatial referent coordinates. Our purpose is not to solve specific problems of motor control or moral decision making but, rather, to test a general theoretical scheme that carries a number of practical implications for both research and education, including the need for collaboration between and among diverse research subdisciplines in kinesiology.

Seeing The Gardener Vallier: Cézanne and Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics of Doubt

ABSTRACT This article looks closely at one of Paul Cézanne’s portraits of Vallier painted the last year of his life to examine how his (“fugitive”) vision works through his use of colors. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who in his phenomenology views the body as the primary locus of having and therefore knowing the world, emphasizes the vital role of the body of the artist that must be offered to the world in order to truly manifest the world in painting. It is no wonder that Cézanne’s artwork and thought are stitched into the structure of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics in his essay “Eye and Mind,” for Cézanne’s painting bears witness to his own account of aesthetic experience. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the lived vision that seeks the depth of Being, the lived qualities of the visible world, takes Cézanne’s vision manifested in his portrait of Vallier further to see where the painting as well as Cézanne himself stand in relation to the visible world.

Existential phenomenology as a unifying philosophy of science for a mixed method study.

This article discusses how existential phenomenology may serve as a frame in a mixed-methods study of changes in weight and body composition among women in adjuvant treatment for breast cancer. In accordance with ontologically and epistemologically fundamental assumptions in nursing, we link mixed-methods and existential phenomenology from the perspective of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his notion of a unified body subject. Letting this perspective permeate our philosophy, methodology and issues at the method level in mixed-method research undermines the distinction between first- and third-person perspective when applying and integrating different data sources in a mixed-methods study. Applying Merleau-Ponty's third way, the women's bodily experiences appear as gestalt; a 'figure' against a ground of existential threats that are grasped through insight from data integrating in joint displays, which revealed the women's experiences on a deep existential level. Existential phenomenology as a frame in mixed-method studies can speak not only to nurses but also to a multidisciplinary audience in a shared attempt to deepen the understanding of a patient's healthcare problem.

Embodiment as an Instrument for Empathy in Social Work

ABSTRACT It is within and through the body that we experience the physical, social, and emotional dimensions of life. This view draws on the existential phenomenological principal of embodiment, as described by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Empathy is considered essential in the social work professional encounter. Prevailing conceptualisations of empathy in social work rely on simulation theory, where the social worker is expected to emulate the internal emotional and mental state of the client. Phenomenologists question the ontological plausibility of this conceptualisation. Their principal critiques are of mirroring, perspective-taking, and the associated emotional and intellectual labour. Expanding on phenomenological research, we suggest an alternate conceptualisation of empathy that integrates embodiment in social work theory, education, and practice. An embodied approach entails an interpretivist lens of subjectivity, direct perception of another’s emotional state, sensitively and bodily attending to narrative, and adopting a compassionate stance of both “understanding and not understanding”. IMPLICATIONS Empathy is an emotion-driven construct. Current views of empathy in social work rely on mentally simulating clients’ emotions. Emotions are embodied in that they are physically felt and expressed. The body is therefore a powerful instrument for better understanding and empathising with clients. Future conceptualisations of empathy used in social work theory, education, and practice would benefit from taking an embodied approach.

Merleau-Ponty’nin Bedenlenme Fenomenolojisi

Bu çalışmanın amacı Fransız düşünür Maurice Merleau-Ponty’nin fenomenolojik yaklaşımını bir bedenlenme teorisi olarak ele almak ve düşünürün kavramsal çerçevesini bedenlenmiş özne ya da bedenlenmiş bilinç kavramı bağlamında sunmaktır. Merleau-Ponty’nin felsefesi öznenin dünya ile ilişkisini algı fenomenolojisi temelinde sunan ve bu noktada algının öznenin bedenselliğinden bağımsız değerlendirilemeyeceğini, algının öznenin bu dünyada bedenli bulunuşuna ait olduğunu söyler. Bu bağlamda düşünür algı zemininde bir beden fenomenolojisi sunar. Merleau-Ponty’nin kendisinin de sıklıkla dile getirdiği gibi, düşünürün bu yaklaşımı geleneksel felsefenin epistemolojik ve ontolojik ayrımlarına, özne ve düşünme süreçlerine dair tanımlamalarına bir karşı çıkıştır. Bununla birlikte, çağdaş ontolojik tartışmalarda, düşünürün felsefesi ve sözü edilen bağlamda sunduğu bedenlenme kavramsallaştırması felsefenin farklı alanlarında ilgi görmekte ve bu tartışmalardaki bedenlenme teorileri arasında yer almaktadır. Bu bağlamda, bu çalışmanın amacı, Merleau-Ponty’nin bedenlenme fenomenolojisini bilinç-beden bütünlüğü kavramı çerçevesinde ele almak ve düşünürün felsefesini geleneksel düalizmlere ve bu düalizmlerin çağdaş felsefedeki yansımalarına bir karşı çıkış olarak değerlendirmektir.

Invisible but sensible aesthetic aspects of excellence in nursing.

Based on a Lived Experience Description written by an experienced nurse in Denmark, this article offers an ontological and existential-phenomenological exploration of aesthetic dimensions of excellence in nursing. In the research of Patricia Benner and colleagues, excellence in nursing is described as a matter of intuitive pattern recognition based on clinical experience and narrative understanding. In this article, and based on phenomenological reflections and philosophical inspirations from the Danish philosopher Dorthe Jørgensen and the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I suggest an extended understanding of excellence in nursing, and I argue that the work and research of Benner seem to overlook ontological and aesthetic aspects of excellence in nursing. This article argues that aesthetic aspects of excellence in nursing can be comprehended as moments where nurses sense a surplus of meaning and moments where the nurse and the patient share and are subjected to communal and unfolding life phenomena. Aesthetic dimensions of being in nursing can, from an ontological approach, best be described as similar to the way human beings listen to a piece of music or to how artists try to give a voice to the world: as a resonant way of being and becoming within the moment.

Ecological Self from an Aesthetic Point of View

The present article develops an aesthetic signification for the idea of an ecological self proposed by Arne Næss and for its underlying relationship of identification. It is based on a discussion of a model of environmental aesthetics – the mystery model – by Stan Godlovitch. Godlovitch has presented his model as an alternative to the cognitive paradigm developed by Allen Carlson. While showing the value of this acentric aesthetic, I am proposing a different version of this model founded on a phenomenological approach – by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This perspective provides a better understanding of a subject's attitude of insignificance and aesthetic aloofness inherent in an acentric aesthetic experience of nature. It also shows what brings together and separates this experience, first from death, and secondly from mysticism. In so doing, it helps establish the legitimacy of the concept of the ecological self by looking at it in a new way.

Dancing Intercorporeality: A Health Humanities Perspective on Dance as a Healing Art

As a contribution to the burgeoning field of health humanities, this paper seeks to explore the power of dance to mitigate human suffering and reacquaint us with what it means to be human through bringing the embodied practice of dance into dialogue with the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualisation of subjectivity as embodied and of intersubjectivity as intercorporeality frees us from many of the constraints of Cartesian thinking and opens up a new way of thinking about how dance functions as a healing art through its ability to ground and reconnect us with self, world, and others--with our humanity. It is argued that through a Merleau-Pontian framework, we can come to appreciate the true potential of dance as a positive and deeply humanising experience, demonstrating how expressive arts practice understood through the lens of philosophical theory can open up new dimensions of understanding and experience in relation to well-being and self- (and other-) care.

Hearing the Voices of Students and Teachers: A Phenomenological Approach to Educational Research

Many contemporary researchers claim to use a phenomenological approach but seldom connect their methods to tenets from phenomenological philosophy. We describe a distinctive approach, grounded in the writings of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for conducting educational research. Procedures are outlined for bracketing pre-understandings of a phenomenon, interviewing, and thematizing data with assistance of an interdisciplinary interpretive group. Using our approach, researchers capture the figural aspects of a phenomenon that dominate perception as well as the contextual background that is less visible but integral to understanding it. This phenomenological approach offers educational researchers a radical empiricism, a flexible structure, and a dialogical community of support.

The Aesthetic Regime of Politics

Although French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style, and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, it was his late notion of flesh1 that became crucial for grounding what I assume to be his aesthetico-political understanding of politics and ultimately democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary with Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary dialectics as a political project. The move represented the earliest and more fundamental rejection of both the revolutionary “solution” to the indeterminate and conflictive character of social life and also to the technocratic and ideological attempt to eliminate democratic politics in the name of market efficiency and neoliberal radicalism – and his former student and friend Claude Lefort was the author who made the most out of this break. In theorizing the historical breakdown of the horizon of radical transcendence implied in the theologico-political regime and in denouncing the re-embracement of the One in the horizon of radical immanence in the totalitarian party’s claim to having access to a complete knowledge of the social, Lefort developed a comprehensive understanding of the social in terms of flesh and of the political as its mise-en-forme, mise-en-sens, and mise-en-scene.

FRAGMENTS OF FEMALE CORPOREALITY IN VICTIMS OF DOMESTICVIOLENCE: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

ABSTRACTThis was a phenomenological study undertaken at the Women's Police Station in Guarapuava in the Brazilian state of Paraná that aimed to understand the significance of living with the offender after filing a domestic violence report at the station. Data were collected by means of interviews with 14 women victims of domestic violence, who continued to live with their attackers after reporting them. The women's discourses were interpreted through the lens of the framework of French philosopher Maurice MerleauPonty. The results showed that the victims' body images were modified, distorted, and negative. Coexistence with the offenders was sustained through destruction and weakening of the victims' body image, thereby reducing their coping skills because they felt threatened, insecure, and inferior to the other, which perpetuated the cycle of violence. In conclusion, there is a need for professionals trained to capture the invisible beneath the visible, in order to take care of abused women in their multidimensionality.

Only a whisper away. A philosophical view of the awake patient's situation during regional anaesthetics and surgery

In this study the awake patient's intraoperative situation and experiences during regional anaesthetics and surgery are reflected upon by using the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological idea of the body as being at the centre of the world highlights the patient's embodied position and bestows significance onto the body as a whole, as a lived body. A case, based on the findings from a previous interview study, is presented as a contextual starting point where a patient goes from having a familiar body recognized as her own to having a partially anaesthetized body experienced as an unknown object. The intraoperative caring space is described in this context as the mutual ground where the awake patient and the nurse anaesthetist (NA) can interact to create meaning. The NA can act as the patient's bodily extension to bridge the gap between the patient's experiences and the situation. This calls for the NA's proximity and genuine presence in order to meet and understand the patient's awake experiences. Learning from the patient's situatedness gives information that is valuable for NAs to share with patients who are less experienced with this contextual situation. The challenge for the NA is not to perform routine-based care, but to acknowledge every patient's lifeworld and uniqueness thus enabling the patient to move easily along the mind-body-world continuum. The core of intraoperative care is to provide support and promote well-being of awake patients in the intraoperative environment. The use of a philosophical perspective is relevant for nurses who work in an intraoperative setting where patients undergo regional anaesthetics. This study shows how nursing research using phenomenological philosophy can help uncover new meanings known only to the patients living the experience.

Subjetividade e linguagem na obra de Merleau-Ponty

A linguagem, produto da atividade social dos seres humanos, é assumida pela Psicologia como um elemento importante no estudo da subjetividade. O presente artigo propõe investigar a importância deste tema a partir da obra do filósofo francês Maurice Merleau-Ponty. O texto encontra-se dividido em duas partes: na primeira são apresentadas reflexões sobre a potência expressiva do corpo e sua importância para a dissolução da oposição entre res cogitans e res extensa nas considerações sobre a constituição do sentido das palavras. Na segunda parte aborda-se a relação entre a fenomenologia da linguagem e a expressividade do corpo, permitindo compreender por que as relações entre subjetividade e linguagem estão radicadas na estrutura do ser-no-mundo.

Anthropological Neurology: Symptoms and Their Meanings According to Joseph Prick (1909–1978)

This article describes the life and work of the Dutch neurologist Joseph Prick (1909–1978) and his idea of an anthropological neurology. According to Prick, neurological symptoms should not only be explained from an underlying physico-chemical substrate but also be regarded as meaningful. We present an outline of the historical and philosophical context of his ideas with a focus on the theory of the human body by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and the concept of anthropology-based medicine developed by Frederik Buytendijk (1887–1974). We give an overview of anthropological neurology as a clinical practice and finally we discuss the value of Prick's approach for clinical neurology today.

Merleau-Ponty: filosofía y pintura

El presente texto intenta comprender porqué el arte y, particularmente, la pintura, se presentan, dentro de la obra del filósofo francés Maurice Merleau-Ponty, como modos ejemplares del fenómeno expresivo y nos permiten, en este sentido, comprender las características propias de la operación perceptiva.

The Pontydian Performance: the performative layer

In this paper we reflect on the performer–instrument relationship by turning towards the thinking practices of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as being at the centre of the world highlights an embodied position in the world and bestows significance onto the body as a whole, onto the body as a lived body. In order to better understand this two-way relationship of instrument and performer, we introduce the notion of the performative layer, which emerges through strategies for dealing with discontinuities, breakdowns and the unexpected in network performance.