Merleau-Ponty argued in "Phenomenology of Perception" (1945) that perception and consciousness are structured fundamentally by the lived body (corps propre) rather than by a disembodied Cartesian cogito or passively received empiricist sense-data. The body, he argued, is neither a mere object among objects nor a pure constituting subject but our general medium for having a world at all, a position he developed against both empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception.
Intellectual setting
Merleau-Ponty developed his phenomenology of embodiment alongside Sartre and Beauvoir in postwar French existentialism, drawing on Husserl's late unpublished manuscripts and on Gestalt psychology to ground his account of perception in concrete bodily experience rather than abstract consciousness.
Key ideas
The lived body as medium of perception
Merleau-Ponty argued that the body is our primary, pre- reflective way of having access to the world, structuring perception before any explicit judgment or sensory registration occurs, so that embodiment is constitutive of experience rather than merely incidental to it.
Beyond empiricism and intellectualism
Merleau-Ponty argued that empiricism (perception as passive registration of sensations) and intellectualism (perception as an act of a pure constituting consciousness) both fail to capture the ambiguous, embodied, pre-reflective structure of lived perceptual experience revealed by careful phenomenological description.
Legacy
Merleau-Ponty is a central figure of French phenomenology and existentialism, and his philosophy of embodiment has shaped subsequent philosophy of mind, embodied cognitive science, and feminist philosophy of the body.