ABSTRACT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) was a French philosopher particularly interested in the nature of human consciousness as embodied experience. He was born in Rochefort-sur-mer, France. As a student at the École normale supérieure, he became interested in phenomenology through the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin HEIDEGGER. After graduating in 1930, Merleau-Ponty taught at different high schools, but with the outbreak of World War II, he served as an officer in the French army. During the German occupation, while participating in the French Resistance, he taught in Paris and composed Phenomenology of Perception (1945), widely regarded as his most important work. Following the war, he cofounded the left-leaning cultural and political journal Les Temps Moderne with Jean-Paul Sartre. Although the journal itself was never tied to a particular political organization, after the war, Merleau-Ponty was an active member of the French Communist Party. His affiliation with the group and his relation with the political and institutional interpretation of MARX’s work became strained however, ultimately resulting in his 1955 work Adventure of the Dialectic. He resigned his position on the editorial board
of Les Temps Modernes after repeated disagreements with Sartre over the latter’s support of North Korea during the Korean War. Merleau-Ponty’s postwar academic career included positions at the Sorbonne and, from 1952 until his premature death in 1961, at the Collège de France.
