Abstract

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is unique in the quality and quantity of in-depth psychological studies he uses to explicate his theses about the primacy of perception, the role of the body, and the relationship between subject and world. This dissertation takes up the influence such psychological considerations upon his conception of the subject. In particular, it examines how in Merleau-Ponty's thought the description of childhood experience increasingly provides the key to understanding the subject as grounded upon a primordial, subjectless immersion in the world. ;From his earliest text, The Structure of Behavior , throughout his magnum opus The Phenomenology of Perception , and in his lectures in child psychology at the Sorbonne , Merleau-Ponty describes how infant experience exposes an underlying layer of existence that precedes subject formation. This historical period of a subject's life is not overcome with the advent of adult subjectivity. It is part and parcel of adult experience, and permits Merleau-Ponty to allow for the overdetermining role culture and history play regarding the subject's life without reducing his philosophy of the subject to a hopeless relativism. Early primordial experience is the ground upon which culturally relative factors are based. Merleau-Ponty's arguments do not demand that he give up the relevance of subjective life; instead, he resituates the subject qua subject as secondary to a-subjective life. Finally, I argue that only by understanding the manner in which these psychological and philosophical considerations develop can one understand Merleau-Ponty's late ontological writings