Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In this course

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodied perception—his insistence that meaning emerges through the body's intimate entanglement with its environment rather than through disembodied cognition—provides crucial ballast for thinking how observers co-constitute artworks and systems rather than standing apart from them. The readings invoke his work on how proximity and involvement reshape perception itself, suggesting that in interactive and algorithmic systems, the observer cannot maintain the detached clarity of an external judge but becomes materially implicated in the very meaning-making process they witness. His emphasis on lived experience over abstract representation helps the course reckon with how AI systems and their users are mutually constitutive, neither pure subject nor pure object.

Background

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.

Mentioned in 3 readings