1. Morning Prayer:
Lord, May your goodness and love be present amongst us
today. Come bless our class with unity, hope and vision.
Lord, build in us all a deep respect for one another so that
your church may be one. Lord bless our teacher, all
educators, and all those who are making difference in the
lives of our young people .
Lord, we pray for hope.
Come stir your hope within our hearts and renew our faith.
Lord, we pray for vision.
May your vision fill our lives as we seek to reveal your love.
We ask all this in the glorious name of Jesus.
Amen.
4. BIOGRAPHY
• Born on March 14th 1908
• Died on May 1961 in Paris
• Lost his father in WW1
• Served in the infantry in WW2
• He completed his philosophy education at the Ecole
Normale Superieure in 1930
• He began teaching high school philosophy in 1930
• He was the Chair of child psychology at Sorbonne in
1949
• He was an educator, philosopher, political scientist,
academic author, editor, and journalist
5. Merleau-Ponty as someone who
generally ‘looked for multiple sides to
any situation’.
Merleau-Ponty was regarded as hands-
down the best dancer of all the thinkers
in the Left Bank jazz scene at that time
Raised a Catholic, he continued to
attend Mass during his time as a
student at the École Normale
TRIVIA
6. Merleau-Ponty became friends with
Simone de Beauvoir when they first
studied philosophy together, both
aged 19, and he got to know Jean-
Paul Sartre shortly after. Some years
later, the three of them would go on
to launch the political journal
Les Temps modernes.
7. Merleau-Ponty
was a French phenomenologist and
founded the existential philosophy,
together with Sartre.
His work draws on the empirical
psychology, the early
phenomenology of Husserl,
Saussure’s structuralism as well as
Heidegger’s ontology.
8. Major influences on his thinking
include Henri Bergson, Edmund
Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max
Scheler, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as
well as neurologist Kurt Goldstein,
Gestalt theorists such as Wolfgang
Köhler and Kurt Koffka, and literary
figures including Marcel Proust, Paul
Claudel, and Paul Valéry.
9. In turn, he influenced the post-
structuralist generation of French
thinkers who succeeded him,
including Michel Foucault, Gilles
Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida
10. His most famous work:
PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE DE LA
PERCEPTION
(1945, Phenomenology of Perception)
established Merleau-Ponty as the
philosopher of the body.
The body is the centre of perceptions
and medium of consciousness.
11. For most of his career, Merleau-
Ponty focused on the problems of
perception and embodiment as a
starting point for clarifying the
relation between the mind and the
body, the objective world and the
experienced world, expression in
language and art, history, politics,
and nature.
12. In Phenomenology of Perception,
Merleau-Ponty wrote, 'Inside and
outside are inseparable. The world is
wholly inside and I am wholly outside
myself. ' To sum it up, this work
asserts that self and perception are
encompassed in a physical body.
Therefore, the physical body is a part
of self.
13. Merleau-Ponty argues that we cannot separate
the certainty of our thoughts from that of our
perceptions, since to truly perceive is to have
confidence in the veracity of one’s perceptions.
Furthermore, we are not transparent to ourselves,
since our “inner states” are available to us only in
a situated and ambiguous way. The genuine
cogito, Merleau-Ponty argues, is a cogito “in
action”: we do not deduce “I am” from “I think”,
but rather the certainty of “I think” rests on the “I
am” of existential engagement.
14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenological philosophy also
suggests the search for the self and
consciousness need not be focused on
the space within our skulls. Instead, we
should turn our attention to the lived
body. He focused on the ways in which
our embodiment is central to our
consciousness and self.
15. The central role of the body for him is not what we might call
the fleshy body. It is not the body that I see in the mirror, weigh
on the scale, treat with medicine; it is not my body taken as an
object among other objects in the world. Rather, he has in mind
what he calls the lived body, which differs from the fleshy body
most centrally in two ways. One, it encompasses aspects of the
brain, the sensory organs, and the extension of our biological bodies
into the world by means of tools and other familiar objects (such as
the blind person's cane); and two, the lived body is our embodiment
not as one more object in the world, but as the implicit conduit and
mediator of our consciousness of the world.
16. The lived body is most centrally what accomplishes
perception -- the form of consciousness he takes as
most fundamental and primordial. Perception is for
him an activity of our body in seamless engagement
(or as he says, "communion") with the world. It
grasps the world, both literally in actions, but more
radically, in perception. The lived body for Merleau-
Ponty extends from the edge of consciousness
where we are aware of things, to the world in which
those things are seen felt and heard.
17. Bodily perception for Merleau-Ponty is most centrally
characterized by three features.
First, it is an independent active synthesis in that it follows
its own rules and processes, synthesizing the perceptual
whole. The presentation of the mug on the table as a mug,
or your utterance of "the cat is on the mat".
Perception presents the object as already unified and
formed by an automatic and unavoidable activity of my
lived body.
18. Second, it is opaque in that its synthesizing is often invisible to my
consciousness as well.
So, for example, I have no real access to the rules or processes by
which my body synchronizes with the utterances of others to present
them to me as words, assertions, and the like; nor to strategies by
which it synthesizes shapes and objects from the fluctuations of light.
Perception takes for granted these opaque activities without providing
me knowledge of their internal nature. So, my visual activity is really
good at teasing apart the effects on my retinal image of scene
illumination from those caused by different colors of surfaces. By
doing so, it provides me with information about constant colors across
differences in light and shadow, but how it does all this is hidden from
my consciousness.
19. Third perception is non-thetic presentation in that it does not
present itself as an object for experience, but
presents something else -- typically, something like the
properties of distal objects. Perceiving red, or squareness, or a
chair, is not phenomenologically experiencing the result of the
independent opaque synthesis as itself. Rather, it's typically
having an experience where that result itself is in a sense
"invisible". We don't have consciousness of it, but
consciousness via it of the worldly objects and features it
presents -- something distal as red, or square, or whatever.
Perception phenomenologically places what it gives to
experience in the world, not in us.
As Merleau-Ponty says, I "abandon myself and plunge into it."
20. This picture puts the realm of consciousness in stark contrast to
a Cartesian-inspired view of a separable realm of indubitably
known experiential atoms of sensory experience or qualia.
This view takes our fundamental perceptual experience as having the
content of external and distal objects (via its non-thetic nature), and
takes the unity of brain, body, and world (accomplished by
independent synthesis) as experientially non-decomposable (because
opaque). This picture puts the realm of consciousness in stark
contrast to a Cartesian-inspired (but often materialist) view of a
separable realm of indubitably known experiential atoms of sensory
experience or qualia. And perhaps most importantly, this alternative
possibility casts a different light on some contemporary worries about
consciousness and the self.
21. The most basic contents of consciousness are
taken as fundamentally inseparable from the
brain/body/world unity, the unity of the self that
presents to us is the embodied self; it is given to
us as our engagement with the physical (and
social) world in perception and action.
22. Merleau-Ponty's view of (especially perceptual) consciousness
as fundamentally a matter of the lived body in "communion"
with the world does not demote or minimize the role of
consciousness. But it does share with contemporary "illusionist"
views of consciousness the idea that it's time to reject a kind of
localized internalism of qualia about consciousness, and to
move toward seeing consciousness and self not as things to be
found in an inner place, but to see that the only conscious self
we do have is the one embodied and immersed in the world
23. The relation between the world and consciousness:
On Merleau-Ponty’s account, we are essentially connected to, and contained
within, the world. Bodily subjectivity is at its core, a collection of motor skills or
habits, which are ways of engaging with our environment, It also depends on what
the world around me is like.
For example:
If I live in a world that contains bicycles, I can learn to ride a bike.
If the world around me contains boulders, I can learn to climb. By constraining the
sorts of skills I can acquire, the world shapes the kind of being I am. Conversely, the
world depends on subjectivity. We have already seen that the way we perceive the
world – the invitations to act that we experience it as offering us – depends on the
skills we possess. So the experienced world that we live in every day is shaped by
the things we do in it.
APPLICATION IN EDUCATION
24. APPLICATION IN EDUCATION
So in the classroom, if we provide our students with varied
learning experiences in order to address individual
differences, they will be able to learn any of those and
discover by themselves whatever they are good at. That will
make learning very meaningful to them.
It is always a challenge for every educator to design
activities that our students to actively engage in in class &
that draw out students' maximum potential and bring out
the best in them. No student was left behind.
