Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the Social World

He was friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and sought to come up with a theoretical alternative to the dichotomy of idealism vs realism. French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty thought that both these positions share the mistaken assumption of a ready-made world that we can know either intellectually (idealism) or empirically (realism). What was missing, for him, was the recognition of the historically situated and embodied character of our experiences of that ‘world’. Part of this character of experience is our embeddedness in a social world. Merleau-Ponty argued that we are so deeply part of it and it of us, that we cannot think of the social as merely an object of study or thought. Why? Because even our ability to think in terms of ‘objects of study’ depends on and is shaped by our social existence. Here is a short quote on the importance of the social from one of his most influential publications, Phenomenology of Perception (published in 1945):

“Thus, we must rediscover the social world, after the natural world, not as an object or a sum of objects, but as the permanent field or dimension of existence: I can certainly turn away from the social world, but I cannot cease to be situated in relation to it. Our relation to the social, like our relation to the world, is deeper than every explicit perception and deeper than every judgment. It is just as false to place us within society like an object in the midst of other objects, as it is to put society in us as an object of thought, and the error on both sides consists in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social world with which we are in contact through the simple fact of our existence, and that we inseparably bear along with us prior to every objectification.”

_{Maurice Merleau-Ponty}

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