ABSTRACT
In 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a junior faculty member at the University of Lyon and was granted the title of professor in January 1948. Such are the outward facts of Merleau-Ponty’s life and career. Merleau-Ponty found some confirmation of his dissatisfaction with the psychological literature in the work of the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of language, painting, and politics are not explanatory theories but attempts to reveal the situational and perspectival character of understanding prior to its abstraction from its perceptual horizons, and so its potential misinterpretation as pure, unconditioned, unsituated, and valid for all times and places. For Merleau-Ponty, objective knowledge is not the end point but the movement of thought in the direction of increasingly impersonal, standpoint-neutral cognition. The other major influence on Merleau-Ponty’s thought was the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology, which arose in the 1910s and 1920s.
