Maurice Merleau-Ponty

A friend once said to me in high dudgeon, as she temporarily cast aside Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, “These people shouldn’t be allowed to be philosophers if they can’t write!”   Many would agree that Merleau-Ponty’s writing is difficult, particularly in translation, finding his convoluted style at times irritatingly hard to follow. It wasn’t until I literally ‘pictured’ his text, imagined it topographically, that I began to gain a richer understanding of its contents. In much the same way that meditation had began to make sense to me when I finally ‘mindfully’ ‘saw’ the air flowing in and out of my body simultaneously with the flow in and out of every other being throughout the entire ‘flesh’ of the world. A wonderful mobile, vital image of the sharing of air. This didn’t happen because I literally ‘thought’ about or tried to analyse how Merleau-Ponty wrote (though to tell the truth I HAD tried to analyse the structure of the Phenomenology without much success); or that I had analysed what a walking meditation with half closed eyes might do for me if I would only concentrate hard enough. These understandings seem just to appear out of nowhere in their happy apparent ‘truthfulness’. The “Ah” moment. In part, being in the right place (and in the right frame of mind) at the right time.  Needless to say, any writer (or maker of any work) who causes an “Ah” moment will become a favourite and a mentor, singled out, reached out for in a moment of need, not just because they have become part of a collection of complementary or informative theories. This is a much more personal experience, more like a love affair with the shapes of words and ideas, being ‘in lust’ with the ‘body’ of the work.