{"id":561,"date":"2025-10-18T20:52:43","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T03:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/?p=561"},"modified":"2025-10-18T20:52:43","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T03:52:43","slug":"maurice-merleau-ponty-the-world-through-our-perception-in-ingolds-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/561","title":{"rendered":"Maurice Merleau-Ponty – The World Through our Perception in Ingold\u2019s Making"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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<\/strong>Background on Maurice Merleau-Ponty<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Merleau-Ponty studied at \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of his greatest inspirations include, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Edmund Hesserl. Husserl being one of Ponty\u2019s professors at \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ponty\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53 while preparing for a class he was teaching on Ren\u00e9 Descartes.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Merleau-Ponty\u2019s Works Referenced in Ingold\u2019s Making<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Le Visible et L’invisible <\/em>(The Visible And The Invisible) is the name given to a collection of unfinished works published first 1964 in French. Among the editor\u2019s notes in first English edition from 1968, Claude Lefort terms Le Visible <\/em>as an \u201cuncompleted work\u201d (xvii) which \u201cbear[s] every where the palpable trace of a thought in effervescence,\u201d cut off from from completion due to Merleau-Ponty\u2019s 1961 death (xv) Lefort describes the work as one which suggests a \u201cnew ontology\u201d for understanding how objects perceived \u201cacquire their full meaning\u201d from external interpretation (xxi). Advancing the notion that our socio-cultural conventions mediate somatic perception, referred to as \u201cperceptual faith,\u201d 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 \u201cflesh\u201d (Todavine, 2025). Allegorical for the necessary connection between \u201cvisible\u201d and \u201cinvisible\u201d \u2014 all that presupposes the visible \u2014 flesh, he contends that together, they combine fundamentally into a singular \u201cchiasm\u201d or vessel of understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second text that Ingold cites is the final essay completed in Merleau-Ponty\u2019s lifetime: Eye and Mind.<\/em> Published posthumously in 1964, the text explores how artistic creation constitutes a single action which connects immersion into one\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though Eye and Mind <\/em>doesn\u2019t explicitly reference the ideas of the incomplete Le Invisible<\/em>, 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\u2019s own experience, eventually feeding back into shaping such broader abstracts in a necessary process. Though Eye and Mind<\/em> does not place these observations in the sharp ontology of flesh or chiasm, it ascribes visual artistic works the character of being \u201cthe inside of the outside and the outside of the inside\u201d; similarly proposing a cyclical duality where perception mediates and is mediated through formal reality (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 164). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ingold\u2019s use of Merleau-Ponty\u2019s Theory in <\/strong>Making<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Ingold first references Merleau-Ponty in exploring a strange quality that creative ideas seem to have – how they seem to \u2018fly away from us\u2019 before we can write them down; paint them; play them on an instrument \u2013 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\u2019invisible, <\/em>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 \u201cmust dash on his bow to follow it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ingold asks, then, how do artists reconcile this \u2013 how are makers able to overcome the fleeting nature of ideas? Ingold\u2019s answer is in the \u2018distance\u2019 \u2013 conceptual or physical, between the maker and the material. To illustrate this, Ingold uses Merleau-Ponty\u2019s observation about sight from Eye and Mind \u2013 <\/em>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, <\/em>as Ingold argues, is to keep yourself at a distance from what you are making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other reference to Merleau-Ponty in Making<\/em> is incorporating his observations about lines <\/em>into Ingold\u2019s deconstruction of the abstract ideas we project onto materials. As Merleau-Ponty argues in Eye and Mind<\/em>, true lines and physical borders don\u2019t really exist in our conscious perception \u2013 they are a conceptual idea that we project onto materials, but we don\u2019t really <\/em>see them. However, Ingold argues, while lines aren\u2019t 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 <\/em>our perception that we use to understand forces, <\/em>a concept that becomes crucial to Ingold\u2019s whole conception of how materials function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lefort, Claude. (1968). Editor\u2019s Note. In M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible<\/em> (pp. xv-xxi). Northwestern University Press. https:\/\/monoskop.org\/images\/8\/80\/Merleau_Ponty_Maurice_The_Visible_and_the_Invisible_1968.pdf<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture. Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Django, Colin & Daniel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty – The World Through our Perception in Ingold\u2019s Making<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":563,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561\/revisions\/563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}