Background on Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), was a French Philosopher who focused heavily on Phenomenology. This field of philosophy, founded by Edmund Husserl and popularized by thinkers like Martin Heidegger seeks to gain knowledge of the world not through scientific inquiry, but through investigating our own lived experience; the way we consciously perceive the world through our bodies and senses.

Merleau-Ponty studied at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. It was here he met his contemporaries Simone de Beauviour and Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he would go on to co-edit a magazine called Le Temps Moderne. These three would fall out in the mid 1950s over differing opinions in radical Marxism. Merleau-Ponty is most known for his integration of Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology into Phenomenology. 

Some of his greatest inspirations include, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Edmund Hesserl. Husserl being one of Ponty’s professors at École Normale Supérieure.

Ponty’s major theoretical published works from his lifetime include The Structure of Behaviour (1942) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945). In which Ponty argues that the Gestalt, or the whole that is more than the sum of its parts, fundamental to our perceptual experience. Ponty suggests that the mind and body are one; both grounded in the physical world, and that we derive all perception from living in our world. Phenomenology of Perception, is what Ponty is most well known for. Some other works he published in his life include; Humanism and Terror (1947), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), Sense and Non-Sense (1948) and Signs (1960/1964). Two works were published after his death; The Prose of the World (1969/1973) and The Visible and the Invisible (1964).

Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53 while preparing for a class he was teaching on René Descartes.  

Merleau-Ponty’s Works Referenced in Ingold’s Making

Le Visible et L’invisible (The Visible And The Invisible) is the name given to a collection of unfinished works published first 1964 in French. Among the editor’s notes in first English edition from 1968, Claude Lefort terms Le Visible as an “uncompleted work” (xvii) which “bear[s] every where the palpable trace of a thought in effervescence,” cut off from from completion due to Merleau-Ponty’s 1961 death (xv) Lefort describes the work as one which suggests a “new ontology” for understanding how objects perceived “acquire their full meaning” from external interpretation (xxi). Advancing the notion that our socio-cultural conventions mediate somatic perception, referred to as “perceptual faith,” Merleau-Ponty argues for a non-dualistic approach to the study of perception which conceives the observer and the object as intertwined and woven of the same “flesh” (Todavine, 2025). Allegorical for the necessary connection between “visible” and “invisible” — all that presupposes the visible — flesh, he contends that together, they combine fundamentally into a singular “chiasm” or vessel of understanding.

The second text that Ingold cites is the final essay completed in Merleau-Ponty’s lifetime: Eye and Mind. Published posthumously in 1964, the text explores how artistic creation constitutes a single action which connects immersion into one’s perception with the conventions of output. He focusses his argument on that of the painter; how their practice requires of them the correction of how they themselves visually experience the world through use of the grammar, techniques, and syntax of the creative medium, requiring embodied action in the accountability separate but essentially married realms of perception and form. 

Though Eye and Mind doesn’t explicitly reference the ideas of the incomplete Le Invisible, they connect in their perspective on the line blurring individual perception with the exterior world. Both penned toward the end of his life, the texts share the view that the observable world we interact with constitutes higher social abstracts that are delegated and sublimated into one’s own experience, eventually feeding back into shaping such broader abstracts in a necessary process. Though Eye and Mind does not place these observations in the sharp ontology of flesh or chiasm, it ascribes visual artistic works the character of being “the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside”; similarly proposing a cyclical duality where perception mediates and is mediated through formal reality (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 164). 

Ingold’s use of Merleau-Ponty’s Theory in Making

Tim Ingold first references Merleau-Ponty in exploring a strange quality that creative ideas seem to have – how they seem to ‘fly away from us’ before we can write them down; paint them; play them on an instrument – how our imagination, and our creative ideas seem so fleeting & ephemeral compared to how slow are bodies can work with material. As Ingold quotes in Le Visible et L’invisible, Merleau-Ponty wrote about this quality as well, speaking of how a melody being played by a violinist seems to fly out in front him and he “must dash on his bow to follow it.”

Ingold asks, then, how do artists reconcile this – how are makers able to overcome the fleeting nature of ideas? Ingold’s answer is in the ‘distance’ – conceptual or physical, between the maker and the material. To illustrate this, Ingold uses Merleau-Ponty’s observation about sight from Eye and Mind – that you cannot see what is right in front of your eye because the boundary between yourself and the what is in front of you will become blurred. The only way to see, as Ponty argues, and the only way to make, as Ingold argues, is to keep yourself at a distance from what you are making.

The other reference to Merleau-Ponty in Making is incorporating his observations about lines into Ingold’s deconstruction of the abstract ideas we project onto materials. As Merleau-Ponty argues in Eye and Mind, true lines and physical borders don’t really exist in our conscious perception – they are a conceptual idea that we project onto materials, but we don’t really see them. However, Ingold argues, while lines aren’t true to our conscious perception, they are true to our rationalized understanding of movement; while we might not see a real line behind a fish as it moves, we rationalize the arc of its movement as a line. Lines, here, are not physical realities that we perceive, but active concepts behind our perception that we use to understand forces, a concept that becomes crucial to Ingold’s whole conception of how materials function.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s observations rooted in the perception of lived experiences offers Ingold an understanding of creative ideas, lines, and our relationship to material that is grounded in our direct experience of the world, and what it can teach us.

Lefort, Claude. (1968). Editor’s Note. In M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible (pp. xv-xxi). Northwestern University Press. https://monoskop.org/images/8/80/Merleau_Ponty_Maurice_The_Visible_and_the_Invisible_1968.pdf 

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Eye and Mind. In The Primacy of Perception (p. 164). Northwestern University Press. https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-primacy-of-perception-by-Maurice-Merleau-Ponty..pdf 

Todavine, T. (2025). Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2025 Edition). <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2025/entries/merleau-ponty/>. 

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture. Routledge.

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