ABSTRACT
Merleau-Ponty was born in the same year as Beauvoir, and also studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in the late 1920s. Like Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre he developed an interest in phenomenology as an alternative to the dominant idealist philosophy of Brunschvicg. This chapter focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s work of 1945, the Phenomenology of Perception. For Merleau-Ponty dialectics are multiple, present in all facets of human existence. Merleau-Ponty points out in the Phenomenology that the ‘problem’ of intersubjectivity is only a problem which one encounter in adult life, when they can come to attain the self-consciousness of the Cartesian cogito. In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty’s most sustained treatment of the world of politics, he again returns to Hegel’s ‘struggle to the death’ between consciousnesses, re-interpreting it more explicitly in terms of embodiment. At the level of social existence, the relations of co-existence and conflict take on yet greater complexity.
