Browse — concepts

Concepts

263 concepts

• Action at a Distance

  The governing figure of the Introduction to Signs (1960). Action at a distance names the relation that holds between philosophy and politics, philosophy and history, and between thought and its "outside" generally: neither subordination (H…

• Action of Unveiling vs. Action of Governing

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction, in Chapter 5 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), between two orders of historical action: the action of unveiling — the writer's, journalist's, artist's, or philosopher's domain of showing, analyzing, exposi…

• Adultomorphism

  Merleau-Ponty's HUB-level methodological diagnostic in the 1949–52 Sorbonne lectures: the recurring temptation to read the child through the adult — to import adult categories, dichotomies, and norms into the description of child experienc…

• Aftermath of the Absolute

  Malraux's structural-historical thesis (Part IV title and §V theme of The Voices of Silence): with the eclipse of religion as the West's organizing absolute, art itself has been promoted to the structural position the absolute occupies. Th…

• Agnosia (Merleau-Ponty)

  Visual agnosia is the clinical condition that gives Merleau-Ponty the case of Schneider in Phenomenology of Perception — Schneider, the WWI veteran whose shrapnel injury produced an inability to perceive the world as a field of possibility…

• Aletheia / Unverborgenheit

  The Greek ἀ-λήθεια (un-concealment), translated by Heidegger hartnäckig (stubbornly) as Unverborgenheit — not for etymology's sake but für die Sache, der bedacht werden muß. Heidegger's most concentrated late treatment of Aletheia is in "D…

• Ambiguïté vs Ambivalence (MP's distinction)

  Merleau-Ponty's philosophically technical distinction between two opposed modes of being-in-contradiction. Contrary to the received cliché of MP as "philosopher of ambiguity" in a weak, irenic sense, Saint Aubert's Ch I §§ 2-3 establishes…

• Amodal Completion

  A class of phenomenal-organizational events identified by Kanizsa (1991) in which the perceptual system "completes" a partially occluded object — perceiving it as continuous behind the occluder despite the absence of any continuous distal…

• Anthropologisme

  Per Saint Aubert (2006 Ch I §2), Merleau-Ponty's anthropologisme is not the same as anthropologie. It is the negative humanism of the humanisme criticiste — Brunschvicg's "humanisme radical où tout est construit et tout est donné" — extend…

• Aquatic Ontology

  The central thesis of Knight's monograph: Merleau-Ponty's late ontology is best understood as a water cosmogony. Being does not emerge through the parting of earth and sky (Heidegger) or the oppressive plenitude of Night (Levinas), but thr…

• Arche-Screen

  Carbone's technical neologism for the transhistorical apparatus of showing-and-concealing images on whatever surface. The arche-screen is not a Platonic form abstracted from its variants (cave wall, mirror, veil, Albertian window, cinema s…

• Art as Revolt Against Fate

  Malraux's cardinal closing thesis in The Voices of Silence: "All art is a revolt against man's fate" (p. 671). Across all civilizations, art's deepest function is to defend man against destiny — the masterpiece "tells of a human victory ov…

• Asymptotic Intentionality

  Frank Chouraqui's technical term (borrowed from Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus) for the structure of intentionality shared by Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty: a linear movement structured by two end-points it never reaches but approaches in…

• Augenblick

  The temporal-existential locus in which past and future converge in decision. Etymologically "blink-of-the-eye," the Augenblick is the moment of seeing-and-deciding — not a temporal point on a timeline but the Zeitlichkeit des Selbsthandel…

• Auseinandersetzung

  Heidegger's technical name for the proper mode of relation to a thinker. Distinct from interpretation, criticism, and refutation, Auseinandersetzung is "die höchste und einzige Weise der wahren Schätzung eines Denkers" — the highest and on…

• Barbarian Principle

  Schelling's concept of the irreducible wild essence at the heart of existence — "could be stifled, but never suppressed" (Ages of the World). Appropriated by Merleau-Ponty as être sauvage (wild being) and esprit sauvage (wild mind), the ba…

• Behavior as Form (Neither Thing Nor Consciousness)

  The signature thesis of Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior — articulated at the end of Ch II and grounding the rest of the book: behavior is irreducibly a form, situated in neither of the two classical orders (in-itself / for-itself…

• Being In and Toward the World (être au monde)

  Merleau-Ponty's signature formulation of the human being's relation to world — the être au monde of Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald Landes as "being in and toward the world" to capture the directional-inhabiting complexit…

• Beständigung des Werdens in die Anwesenheit

  Heidegger's climactic thesis on the essence of will to power: it is the Beständigung des Werdens in die Anwesenheit — the making-stand-fast of becoming into abiding presence. The phrase appears at the close of Der Wille zur Macht als Erken…

• Body Schema

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the pre-reflective, practical awareness of the body's posture and configuration — not a representation of the body, but a system of postural readiness oriented toward tasks. MP takes the term from Henry Head and Pa…

• Broad vs. Narrow Psychoanalysis

  Merleau-Ponty's named taxonomy of post-Freudian options, articulated at the 1949–50 Sorbonne (chapter 2 §III of Child Psychology and Pedagogy). MP names the broad camp explicitly: Politzer, Bachelard, Sartre ("existential psychoanalysis"),…

• Capital as Concrete Phenomenology of Spirit

  Merleau-Ponty's reading of Marx's Capital as a Phénoménologie de l'esprit concrète — the economic-historical structure of capitalism read as the real-world unfolding of phenomenological structure. Capital is not a work of political economy…

• Cartesian Oscillation

  Merleau-Ponty's name for Descartes's inability to sustain a single conception of Nature. In the 1956–57 first Nature course, MP reads Descartes as running two incompatible inspirations — Nature as exteriority (res extensa, infinite mechani…

• Changement de quantité en qualité (degeneration thesis)

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947–49 articulation of how stalinism emerges from leninism without revolutionary rupture: through a change of quantity into quality, of means into end ("changement de quantité en qualité, de moyen en fin"). What was an exc…

• Chiasm

  Merleau-Ponty's concept for the crossing, encroachment, and mutual enveloping of sensing and sensed — the central structural concept of his late ontology. Crucially, the chiasm is structural non-coincidence: "It is time to emphasize that i…

• Circulus Vitiosus Deus

  Nietzsche's phrase from Beyond Good and Evil §56 — "Well? And wouldn't this then be — circulus vitiosus deus?" — asking whether the mysterious desire to think "down to the depths of pessimism" might itself be a return to an opposite ideal,…

• Co-Naissance

  A portmanteau from Paul Claudel's Art poétique (1907) that fuses naissance (birth) with connaissance (knowledge): to know is to be co-born. Merleau-Ponty adopts this concept from his earliest work (The Structure of Behavior, 1942) through…

• Coexistence

  Merleau-Ponty's term in Phenomenology of Perception for the structural togetherness of bodies, points, sensations, and selves that is not built up from prior atomic units but is presupposed in the unity of any experience. Coexistence names…

• Coherent Deformation

  Malraux's term, transformed by Merleau-Ponty into the universal form of expressive operation. Coherent deformation is what happens when a style — a painter's, a writer's, a culture's — reorganizes the available system of signs "by affectin…

• Concrete Mediation

  Inkpin's term for the mode by which individuals relate to a cultural world through particular works, events, and influences (touchstones) rather than through shared types or universal properties. The relation is piecemeal (mediated by indi…

• Condemned to Meaning

  Merleau-Ponty's compressed formula for the structural condition of human existence: meaning is forced on us by virtue of being-in-the-world, and yet meaning is never guaranteed against non-sense, error, or breakdown. The phrase first appea…

• Conditioned Freedom

  Merleau-Ponty's doctrine of freedom in Part Three Ch III of Phenomenology of Perception — a doctrine positioned against Sartre's "total freedom" of Being and Nothingness (1943) without ever naming Sartre. The slogan MP extracts and rejects…

• Consciousness of Life as Consciousness of Death

  Merleau-Ponty's compressed formula from "Hegel's Existentialism" (Chapter 5 of Sense and Non-Sense, Les Temps Modernes No. 7, April 1946): "consciousness of life, taken radically, is consciousness of death" (p. 66). For there to be a consc…

• Constituting vs Instituting Subject

  The paradigm-shift thesis that Merleau-Ponty's 1954–55 institution-concept marks not an internal development of Husserlian Stiftung but a near-antagonist of the constituting subject of Husserlian-Cartesian transcendental phenomenology. The…

• Contingency of the Future

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the structural condition of historical time as it bears on political legitimacy and political guilt. There is no science of the future: every political reading of a situation is unavoidably a wager that may turn ou…

• Convergence Thesis (MP)

  Merleau-Ponty's methodological doctrine articulated in chapter 6 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1950–52): twentieth-century scientific psychology and abstract philosophy were born as opposed and thereby complicit; they have converged me…

• Cristallisation (Stendhal → Breton → MP)

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal anti-Sartre concept, appropriated from Stendhal's De l'Amour (1822) via Breton's L'Amour fou (1937). Cristallisation names the passive-active process by which the loved object (and, generalized, every perceived thi…

• Cultural World

  The "cultural world" is the philosophical problem-space of how shared meanings are produced, transmitted, and inhabited across time. Husserl's Crisis §9 treats geometry as exemplary for "the entire cultural world" (Husserl 366, 368), assum…

• Culturalism (Merleau-Ponty)

  Merleau-Ponty's appropriation, in the 1949–52 Sorbonne lectures, of the American "cultural sociology" tradition (Kardiner, Linton, Mead, Erikson, Du Bois) as the methodological framework for relating psyche, family, and society. Distinguis…

• Daß/Was Distinction

  Schelling's 1850 Quelle lecture distinguishes two "aspects" of what Kant had called the Ideal of Pure Reason: (A) the Ideal qua Reason — the "completely determinate concept [Inbegriff] of all possibilities," the Was ("whatness," totality o…

• Dedifferentiation

  Merleau-Ponty's term for the structural feature of sleep that distinguishes it from both waking consciousness and pure unconsciousness: not absence of articulation, but the collapse of the diacritical system by which waking consciousness h…

• Dehiscence

  Merleau-Ponty's technical term, borrowed from botany (the splitting of a seed pod or anther), for the body's "splitting in two" by which it opens itself to itself and to the world. "A sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and... between…

• Depth (Profondeur)

  The central concept of "Eye and Mind" and a load-bearing term across Merleau-Ponty's late ontology. Depth is not the third spatial dimension derived from height and width (Descartes' view). It is "the experience of the reversibility of dim…

• Depth of Time (Temporal Depth)

  The temporal counterpart of spatial depth: the felt thickness of time as inherent to a perspective, not a distance representable "in profile." Décarie-Daigneault 2024 develops the structural parallel with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of s…

• Dimensional this (my body as bearer of dimensions)

  A V&I working-note coinage — left in English in MP's French original — for the structure by which the body, while singular and concrete (a this), is also a dimension: a level that organizes the perceptible field. The June 1960 working note…

• Dividuation

  Carbone's coinage (2016) for the condition of screen-mediated life: since "individual" etymologically means in-dividuus, "indivisible," the self that simultaneously lives in/through many screens and windows — playing many roles, maintainin…

• Donation en chair (Leibhaftigkeit)

  MP's reworking of Husserl's Leibhaftigkeit ("bodily givenness" — the presence en chair et en os of the thing in perception). Saint Aubert's Ch IV reconstructs MP's rewriting across two simultaneous accents: (a) tighter immanence — the thin…

• Double-Sided Artifact

  A heuristic distinction articulated by Décarie-Daigneault (2024), drawing on Philippe Grosos's Des profondeurs de nos cavernes (2021): an artifact understood as combining two sides — voluntary expression + collateral trace — both of which…

• Embodied Act of Framing

  Lisa van Sorge's (2025) signature concept and the constructive thesis of her synthesis of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida for a contemporary phenomenological aesthetics. Embodied act of framing names painting reread as the embodied subject's two…

• Empiètement (Encroachment)

  MP's figure for the overlap between terms that a Cartesian ontology would require to be distinct — self/other, inside/outside, flesh/being, soul/body, perception/motricity. Saint Aubert elevates the figure to method-defining status on the…

• Encounter (Deleuze)

  Deleuze's concept (chiefly Difference and Repetition 1968) for an event that occurs at the surface — that is, in the present — and which commands the opening of a certain depth in the virtual past. The encounter is what "forces us to think…

• End of Philosophy (das Ende der Philosophie)

  Heidegger's late thesis: philosophy as metaphysics — from Plato through Hegel-Husserl-Nietzsche-Marx — has ended in the present age. The end is Vollendung, not cessation: a Versammlung in die äußerste Möglichkeit (gathering into outermost…

• Ereignis (Heidegger's advent of Being)

  Heidegger's late term — typically rendered "advent of Being" or "appropriating event" — for the non-causal event by which Being gives itself, ereignet sich, in a "vertical" history that does not unfold along the horizontal axis of cause an…

• Erregender Zwiespalt zwischen Wahrheit und Kunst

  The "agitating discord" between art and truth at the heart of Nietzsche's late metaphysics. Nietzsche himself names it in 1888: "Über das Verhältnis der Kunst zur Wahrheit bin ich am frühesten ernst geworden: und noch jetzt stehe ich mit e…

• Essential Prematureness of Revolution

  Merleau-Ponty's claim in Chapter 4 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), against Marxist theories of revolution-as-maturation: revolutions are not "anticipations" of conditions that will one day be mature; they have an essential premature…

• Eternal Recurrence

  Nietzsche's thought that the same events will repeat, identically, an infinite number of times — first introduced in The Gay Science §341 (the "greatest weight") and developed through Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the notebooks, and Ecce Homo. N…

• Experimental Platonism

  Ruyer's coinage — originally for the phenomenon of supra-normal stimuli in ethology (eggs that are "more spotted than spotted eggs," dummies "more typical than typical" that elicit stronger responses from animals than the natural objects t…

• Expressive Will (poussée, drive to speak)

  The affective and volitional substrate of lateral universality in Merleau-Ponty's account of language. Linguistic universality is not first a structural-conceptual feature shared by languages; it is a drive (poussée) of speaking subjects w…

• Fait Primitif

  Maine de Biran's concept from the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur ses rapports avec l'étude de la nature, retained by Merleau-Ponty from his 1947-48 ENS lectures on Biran through the November 1960 V&I working notes. The f…

• Faith and Good Faith (MP's 1946 formulation)

  Merleau-Ponty's resolution of the apparent opposition between faith (unreserved commitment going beyond what is given) and good faith (sincerity in saying what one thinks). Developed in the 1946 essay "Faith and Good Faith" (Chapter 12 of…

• Figuratifs

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal late-manuscript concept (1959-1960) for the non-figural conditions of visibility: fond, ombre, horizon, profondeur, silence, reflet, relief, éclairage, niveau. These are not figures and not nothing — they are what…

• Figure-Ground Relationship

  The phenomenal-organizational structure first analyzed by Edgar Rubin (1915) and integrated into Gestalt theory by Koffka: within any visual field, some regions become figure (object-like, present, locatable, meaningful) while others becom…

• Flesh as Element

  Merleau-Ponty's central late ontological concept: the flesh (chair) is not matter, not mind, not substance, but an "element" in the Presocratic sense — water, earth, fire, air. The canonical definition is in V&I Ch 4, p. 139-140: "What we…

• Fold (Pli)

  Merleau-Ponty's figure for the ontological structure by which the multiple comes from the one without external cutting — the continuum of form and content that dissolves the dualism/monism dilemma. V&I Ch. 4 Section "Folds" (pp. ~139–141)…

• Freud Without Demonology

  Merleau-Ponty's recurrent methodological stance toward psychoanalysis: keep the clinical discovery, refuse the metapsychology, reread perceptually. The phrase "demonology" is Freud's own self-criticism — he admitted that positing a second…

• Fundamental Thought in Art

  Merleau-Ponty's term for the implicit ontological inquiry carried by literature, painting, and music — a genuine philosophical content that is not translated philosophy but a disclosure of new relationships to Being that official philosoph…

• Generative Passivity

  The ontological origin of sense in nonsense — not mere inertness or absence of activity, but a "generative temporal openness" that precedes and grounds all constituting activity. Generative passivity names the emergence of activity from no…

• Gestalt Principles of Unification

  The set of perceptual-organizational factors — first identified by Wertheimer (1923) and developed across Gestalt psychology (Koffka, Köhler, Kanizsa, Metzger) — that determine how elements within the visual field are grouped into unified…

• Gloria

  Merleau-Ponty's term — borrowed from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, where it is Maria's word for the moment of harmony in which "events respond to their will" — for the moment of victory in commitment under contingency. The gloria "m…

• Good Ambiguity / Bad Ambiguity

  The structural distinction at the heart of Merleau-Ponty's 1960-61 course on "Philosophy and Nonphilosophy since Hegel." Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit contains a good ambiguity — the ineinander of phenomenology and the absolute, liv…

• Grain du sensible

  Merleau-Ponty's concept for the optimum at which perception stops exploration and adheres — the écart between my body and the perceived that makes the perceived inépuisable but present. The grain is what arrests the caress, what defines th…

• Granite of Fate

  Nietzsche's figure from Beyond Good and Evil §231 for the uneducable bodily substratum of the individual — the fixed aspect of the self that all subsequent development can redirect but neither create nor erase. "Deep in us, really 'down th…

• Großer Stil

  Nietzsche's name, in his late writings, for the highest mode of artistic creation: not classicism, not romanticism, but mastery over a chaos that is one's own. Heidegger reads großer Stil in Nietzsche I I.14-15 as the form-giving counter-s…

• Habitual Body

  The habitual body (corps habituel) is Merleau-Ponty's technical term in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) for the body considered as a sedimented field of acquired postures, capacities, and orientations — the body of "I can" rather than t…

• Haecceity

  A scholastic term — Latin haecceitas, literally "thisness" — that Merleau-Ponty deploys throughout Phenomenology of Perception without ever defining or naming its source. In MP's hands, haecceity is the irreducibly singular pole of percept…

• Healing Schneider

  Chouraqui's 2025 name for the positive side of Merleau-Ponty's ethical project: opposing and undoing the agnosiastic tendencies that MP diagnoses across clinical, political, existential, and ontological registers. The project is not buildi…

• Heidegger as Silenced Interlocutor

  The philological-corrective thesis that MP's reading of Heidegger was archivally thin — and that the dominant "Heideggerian turn" reading of late MP projects backwards from late stylistic resonances onto a philosophical genesis that came f…

• Hermeneutical Reverie

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the method proper to the understanding of the positive symbol — a mode of philosophical attention that neither decodes (Freud) nor unmasks (Sartre) but accompanies the echoing of meaning through totality. "Method p…

• High-Altitude Thinking

  See also pensee-de-survol (corpus-level HUB) — the cross-corpus structural negation-target across MP's entire career, with the four rejected variants (Brunschvicgian, Piagetian, liberal-political, theological-explicative) and the impossibl…

• Hinge

  Merleau-Ponty's figure (charnière, gond, pivot) for a structure that articulates two terms without reducing either to the other — a structure that produces its terms as poles rather than mediating between pre-existing ones. The hinge appea…

• Historical Responsibility

  Merleau-Ponty's name for a positive philosophical category that exceeds liberal "intention/circumstance" distinctions: the political agent is responsible for the role he plays as it is read by his victims and his inheritors — for what othe…

• Homme en porte-à-faux

  Merleau-Ponty's 1946 figure for the structural cantilevering of human existence — being-and-rien, being-here-and-nowhere, voué-à-l'être-and-défaut-dans-l'être, néant-et-être all at once and not in turn. Articulated in the Brussels conferen…

• Horizons of Language (vs. Limits)

  Kee 2025's reformulation of Merleau-Ponty's anti-relativist response in the early 1950s and PbP: against Wittgenstein's "the limits of my language are the limits of my world," MP holds that the horizons of my language are the horizons of m…

• Humanism in Extension / Humanism in Intension

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947 political distinction between two senses of "humanism." Humanism in intension ("intensive") is the love of humanity as embodied in a few — the guardians of Western culture who preserve its "treasure" and whose status i…

• Hyper-dialectic

  Merleau-Ponty's term (hyperdialectique) for a dialectic that overcomes "bad dialectic" — the dialectic that "thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" (V&I Ch 2, p…

• Hyper-objet (Saint Aubert)

  Emmanuel de Saint Aubert's own constructive concept introduced in Être et chair II Ch III § 3 ("Portance et anti-portance des ultra-choses au-delà de Merleau-Ponty") as a correction to Merleau-Ponty's treatment of the ultra-chose. The hype…

• Hyper-reflection

  Merleau-Ponty's name (sur-réflexion) for the operation that radicalizes reflection by taking itself and the changes it introduces into the spectacle into account. Introduced in The Visible and the Invisible Ch 1 (p. 38) as the alternative…

• Idea-as-dimension (the idea is the level)

  In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty deploys an unusual ontological identification: the Idea — the musical idea, the idea of light, the idea of a colour — is a level or dimension of the visible, not a content above or behind it.…

• Idole (anti-figuratif)

  Merleau-Ponty's polemical name for the figure without fond — the image-fetish that pretends to total self-presence and thereby blocks access to the figuratif-register of being. The idole is the epistemic equivalent of Descartes' idée clair…

• Imaginary (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's late account of the imaginary — distinct from any regional psychology of imagination — names a structural-ontological register in which the mode of being characteristic of imagination (ubiquity, hovering, inexhaustibility, presence-ab…

• Imperception

  The structural non-givenness of the perceptual levels and backgrounds that make perception possible. "Consciousness is, if you like, synonymous with imperception. Consciousness of a figure is consciousness without knowledge of the backgrou…

• Imperfecting Expression

  David Morris's signature deformation of Smolin's neo-Leibnizian principle ("maximize difference, against identity of indiscernibles"). Morris's principle: "The principle isn't maximizing difference but 'imperfecting expression'" (morris-20…

• Implex

  A term Merleau-Ponty borrows from Paul Valéry (alongside "chiasm") to name the body's anonymous, subconscious capacity — the optic nerves, musculature, ecological systems that are not activities but potentials for difference. Valéry coins…

• Inconscient primordial (Inconscient d'ek-stase)

  The late MP's term for a carnal unconscious that replaces — not supplements — consciousness as the operator of the être à la chose par l'intermédiaire du corps. Saint Aubert's reading (E&C II Ch VI) argues that the Notes sur le corps (1956…

• Incorporation of Truth

  Nietzsche's term (Einverleibung der Wahrheit) for the method by which the knowledge that truth is falsification is converted from an intellectual item into embodied, instinctive orientation. Introduced in The Gay Science (§§11, 110), the p…

• Indirect Language

  Merleau-Ponty's thesis (developed in "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," 1952, and in "On the Phenomenology of Language," 1951) that all language is indirect and allusive — that "the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical"…

• Indirect Ontology

  The philosophical problem-space of how to do ontology without standing outside Being to describe it — and the family of methods MP develops to solve it. Indirect ontology refuses both the Heideggerian conceit of direct ontological speech a…

• Individu de classe

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947–48 reading of Marx's Idéologie allemande: the individu de classe is the On (impersonal "one") that mediates the historical subject and the historical-economic conditions — "porté à la fois par conditions matérielles et…

• Ineinander

  German for "one inside the other" or "interleaving." In Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy, the Ineinander names the fundamental ontological structure: the mutual implication, overlapping, and interlocking of self and world, visible and invis…

• Infantile Polymorphism

  Merleau-Ponty's positive concept replacing "infantile mentality" (Lévy-Bruhl, Charles Blondel) and "small adult" (classical psychology's assimilationist view). The cardinal formula (CPP ch. 7 §V, line 4942): "There is no infantile mentalit…

• Initiation (the opening of a dimension)

  In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty deploys the term initiation at one of the rare moments where he gives a definition outright: initiation names the operation by which a perceptible (or affective, or linguistic) level is estab…

• Institution

  Merleau-Ponty's counter-concept to Husserlian constitution, developed in his 1954–55 Collège de France course "Institution in Personal and Public History." For a constituting subject, "there are only the objects which it has itself constit…

• Institution of the Proletariat

  Tamara Caraus's coinage for Merleau-Ponty's reabsorbed proletariat: the proletariat freed from party, dictatorship, and historical-mission persists as a unique institution whose distinctive function is the intensification of the question w…

• Intentional Arc

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the unity that underlies perception, intelligence, memory, projection, desire, and motility — the "vector" that binds the life of consciousness into a single intending-of-the-world. Introduced in Part One Ch III.j…

• Intentional Transgression

  Husserl's term (intentionales Überschreiten, from the Cartesian Meditations) as taken up and generalized by Merleau-Ponty in Signs' "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (1959) and "On the Phenomenology of Language" (1951). Intentional transgre…

• Interactive Ontology

  Caleb Faul's (2024) coined term for the metaphysical view his reading of Rothenberg's Three Heads through MP's institution-logic motivates. Things are neither static (complete all at once) nor self-contained (sealed off from interaction);…

• Interanimality

  Merleau-Ponty's working-note term (interanimalité) for intercorporeity generalized beyond the human: the species-level dimension of carnal life, in which animals of the same species — and, the later notes suggest, across species — share a…

• Intercorporeity

  Merleau-Ponty's name (intercorporéité) for the structure that makes the other accessible — not as a foreign for-itself but as another locus of the same reversibility in which I am already caught up. Intercorporeity is reversibility extende…

• Interdependence Claim

  Felipe León's signature coinage for the bidirectional reciprocal-foundation thesis Merleau-Ponty draws from Saussure: instituted language requires speaking subjects for its existence qua social institution, AND speaking subjects require an…

• Interior God / Exterior God (Incarnation Read Socially)

  Merleau-Ponty's structural reading of Catholicism's spiritual ambiguity in Sense and Non-Sense's "Faith and Good Faith" (Chapter 12, Les Temps modernes No. 5, February 1946). The Augustinian interior God ("turn inward... truth dwells withi…

• Interrogation

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the methodological mode of The Visible and the Invisible — philosophy not as doubt, not as awakening of consciousness, not as essence-intuition, but as question-savoir ("question-knowing"): a knowing whose form is…

• Interworld

  The interworld (l'intermonde) is Merleau-Ponty's name, in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955, Ch 5), for the middle order between men and things: "history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made" (AD 200). It is the order that Sartre's ontology of cog…

• Intra-Ontology (Indirect Ontology)

  Merleau-Ponty's method-concept for an ontology that does not stand outside Being to describe it but operates within it — "Being in the beings." MP's formulation from the February 1959 V&I working note: "One cannot make a direct ontology. M…

• Kinetic Melody of Behavior

  The melody-figure deployed by Merleau-Ponty in The Structure of Behavior (1942) as the philosophical model for the temporal Gestalt of behavior, learning, perception, and organic life. SB is the documented 1942 origin site of MP's signatur…

• Kybernetik as Grundwissenschaft

  Heidegger's 1964 thesis: Cybernetics is the new Grundwissenschaft (fundamental science) that determines and steers the dispersed sciences in the completed-philosophy age. Locus classicus: "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denke…

• Lateral Universal

  Merleau-Ponty's alternative to the "overarching universal" of classical rationalism and of Husserl's early eidetic phenomenology. A lateral universal is acquired between cultures, philosophies, or perspectives rather than given above them;…

• Lebenswelt

  Husserl's concept of the pre-theoretical lifeworld — the world as it is lived before any scientific or philosophical idealization. In Merleau-Ponty's reading, the Lebenswelt is not merely one "layer" of experience among others but is incre…

• Leitfrage and Grundfrage

  Heidegger's architectonic distinction between two questions of philosophy. The Leitfrage (guiding question) is "Was ist das Seiende?" — "What is the being?" — i.e., what makes a being a being? This question, given its decisive form by Aris…

• Lethe / Verbergung

  Heidegger's late name for the Sich-verbergen (self-concealing), Verborgenheit, that belongs to ἀ-λήθεια als das Herz — as the heart, not as a mere addition or like shadow to light. Locus classicus: "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe…

• Letting-Be (laisser-être)

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the comportment that "lets the perceived world be rather than posits it" (VI 138/102) — the structural form of voyance applied to the philosophical object, and the "primordial unconsciousness" that is "the initial…

• Lichtung

  Heidegger's late name for the Offenheit (openness) — the free open — that grants any Scheinen (showing), any Zeigen (appearing), and any An- und Abwesendes (presencing or absence). Locus classicus: "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe…

• Light of the Flesh

  Merleau-Ponty's late doctrine of a "new idea of light": light inseparable from shadow, structurally diffused in the flesh rather than emanating from an intelligible sun. Developed in the preparatory notes for the 1960–61 course "Philosophy…

• Lived Gestural Expression

  Merleau-Ponty's most condensed Sorbonne-period statement on bodily expression as the medium of intersubjectivity, articulated in chapter 8 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1951–52). The cardinal thesis: "To perceive the other is to deciph…

• Lived Perspective

  Merleau-Ponty's term for the perspective we actually perceive, as distinct from the geometric perspective a camera (or Renaissance painter following the rules of prospettiva) would project. Lived perspective is non-Euclidean: oblique circl…

• Logique de fait

  Merleau-Ponty's 1946 figure for the rationality history exhibits in fact — without the necessity of formal logic, without the abstraction of Kantian transcendental logic, without the closure of Hegelian Wissenschaft der Logik. Logique de f…

• Machenschaft

  Heidegger's name for the mode of Being in the completed epoch of metaphysics — the form Seiendheit (beingness) takes when the Vollendung has installed Seinsverlassenheit (abandonment by Being) as the prevailing condition. Machenschaft is n…

• Making Visible (Sichtbarmachen)

  Paul Klee's 1920 formula from the Schöpferische Konfession (Creative Credo) — "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible" ("Die Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar") — transformed by Merleau-Pon…

• Man, the Hero (the Contemporary Hero)

  Merleau-Ponty's existential-ethical figure of the post-1940 hero — the figure "condemned to follow out fragile meanings without either the triumph of an absolute or the relief of despair." The concept is given its concentrated statement in…

• Marxist Machiavellianism

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947 coinage for the form of political action distinctive to Marxism: a dialectical politics that names its detours and subordinates them to a general definition of the phase, distinguishing it from "pure" Machiavellianism…

• Matrixed Ontology

  Kaushik's term for Merleau-Ponty's ontology understood as fundamentally symbolic — an ontology in which the symbolic-matrix is not a regional psychoanalytic concept but the ontological tissue prior to formal ontology. The matrixed ontology…

• Mechanism / Vitalism

  The classical opposition in philosophy of biology between mechanism (the organism is reducible to its physico-chemical parts and processes) and vitalism (the organism is governed by an irreducible vital principle, entelechy, élan vital, et…

• Melting Time (temps fondant)

  David Morris's name (drawn from a Merleau-Ponty unpublished working note) for the indeterminate, invisible, undifferentiated change prior to time-orders that, through its own dynamics, generates visible, determinate time-forms. Morris's ti…

• Metamorphosis (in art)

  Malraux's central concept in The Voices of Silence: metamorphosis is a law governing the life of every work of art (p. 72). Works survive across time not by repeating their original meaning but by being recreated in each new vocabulary tha…

• Metaphoricity

  A term developed by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Poetic of the World, Ch 5) to name the carnal-ontological capacity for analogy that grounds all linguistic metaphor in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Metaphor is not a semantic transfer between pr…

• Metaphysische Grundstellung

  Heidegger's name for the structural form a metaphysical position takes within the Leitfrage-history. A Grundstellung is not a "viewpoint" or "doctrine" but the four-fold articulation by which a thinker takes a Stand (stance) within the una…

• Motivation (MP)

  Merleau-Ponty's technical name for the phenomenal connection between experience and what it reveals — the "third term" between causal determination and logical entailment that governs the phenomenal-field. Borrowed from Husserl's Ideen II…

• Motor Intentionality

  Merleau-Ponty's name (via Husserl's Bewegungsentwurf, "motor project") for the body's pre-reflective directedness toward a practical task — the "third term" between mechanism and representation that Part One of Phenomenology of Perception…

• Multilateral Emergence

  A concept introduced by Décarie-Daigneault (2025) to describe the non-teleological character of emergence in organic systems as theorized by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Standard scientific accounts treat emergence as progressive comple…

• Museum Without Walls

  Malraux's coinage (le musée imaginaire, 1947) for the virtual universal collection that photographic reproduction has produced. The English title of Stuart Gilbert's translation of Les Voix du silence (1953) gives the phrase its anglophone…

• Nachverstehen

  Husserl's term from "The Origin of Geometry" (HUA 371), taken up by Merleau-Ponty in his 1959–60 course as naming a mode of understanding that is fundamentally different from reactivation. Reactivation aims at total survey — "reactivating…

• Nascent State (état naissant)

  Merleau-Ponty's recurring formulation in Phenomenology of Perception for the moment-just-before-objectification — the layer at which sense, perception, time, language, or freedom is being born without yet having been constituted as an obje…

• Natural Symbolism

  Nature itself operates symbolically, and human symbols are a "second physis" that repeats natural symbolics rather than imposing external meaning. Knight argues that Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy, read through Schelling's Naturphilosophi…

• Naïve Linguistic Consciousness

  Merleau-Ponty's name (PbP 41, 221) for the natural attitude towards language: the immersion in one's native language that takes the language as transparent, modeled-upon being (calquée), and treats other languages as "tinted" or opaque. Th…

• Negative Reality of Love

  Merleau-Ponty's philosophical reading of Proust's Swann in Love and Albertine cycle: love is neither illusion nor positive possession but negative reality — a hollow instituted in the subject by the beloved, in which the impossibility of f…

• New Liberalism

  Merleau-Ponty's programmatic political stance, formulated in the Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). A "sort of new liberalism" (AD 224) that (a) refuses the dictatorship of the proletariat, (b) accepts Communist action and rev…

• No man's land (1949)

  Merleau-Ponty's political diagnosis of the 1947–49 bipolar conjuncture: the world has become a No man's land in which neither classical Marxism nor classical liberal capitalism applies. The USSR ≠ socialism (the proletariat is not the lead…

• Non-Identity-Based Sense

  Inkpin's coinage for the mode of sense-realization in which particulars (works) matter as such and are balanced with — but not reduced to — generality (style). Coined as the structural counterpart to Husserlian identity-based sense, where…

• Nonphilosophy

  The organizing concept of Merleau-Ponty's 1959 course "The Possibility of Philosophy Today." Nonphilosophy designates not the absence or negation of philosophy but a dual condition: the destruction of classical philosophy (substance, subje…

• Onirisme (troisième ordre)

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the hybrid ontological register that is neither fully real nor fully imaginary — the "third order" in which perception and imagination intersect. Onirisme is the ontology-of-the-dreamwork that MP develops from 1949…

• Ontogenesis of Time

  The local generation of time-orders out of melting time / change-dynamics. The phrase comes from a Merleau-Ponty unpublished working note (BNF vol. VIII Notes 1958-1959 p. [253]) and is developed by Morris (2024) into a structural-physical…

• Ontological Difference

  The distinction between Being (Sein, être) and beings (Seiende, étant), originating in Heidegger's philosophy and critically reworked by Merleau-Ponty. Being is not a supreme entity but "that which is not nothing" — the es gibt ("there is"…

• Ontological Diplopia

  A term Merleau-Ponty borrows from Maurice Blondel to name the structural co-presence of two ontological perspectives — a "positivist" one (being exists; nothingness has no properties; the world is positively real) and a "negativist" one (d…

• Ontologie de l'objet

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal late-period polemical category — the ontologie de l'objet names any ontology that treats being on the model of the frontal observable object. The unifier behind Descartes, Kant, Sartre, and Piaget is not their disa…

• Operative Intentionality

  The pre-predicative, pre-reflective intentionality that "establishes the natural and pre-predicative unity of the world and of our life" (PhP, p. lxxxii). A Husserlian term (fungierende Intentionalität) that Merleau-Ponty makes the load-be…

• Organismal Institution

  Jan Halák's name for Merleau-Ponty's extension of the institution-concept to organic life — the thesis that life is institution: a "form-generating logic inherent to life itself" expressing "proto-historicity and proto-culturality." Not a…

• Parergon

  Derrida's figure for the structure that "disconcerts any opposition" between inside and outside of the work of art, developed in The Truth in Painting / La vérité en peinture (1978; trans. Bennington–McLeod 1987). The word — Greek παρέργον…

• Passence

  Décarie-Daigneault's neologism (2024) for the modality of past-given-as-implicated in the present — the having-been-here of an entity disclosed by an encounter with its trace, given not as historical fact-of-presence but as a past that has…

• Passivity

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the constitutive non-coincidence of the subject with itself — "softness in the dough of consciousness," "a germ of sleep, disease, death present even within its acts." Theorized as the subject of MP's 1954–55 Collè…

• Pensée de Survol (Philosophy of Survey)

  The negative pole of Merleau-Ponty's late ontology: the failed philosophical posture of viewing the world from above (the "Sirius perspective," the "God-like survey," the position of the observateur absolu, the Kosmotheoros of Philosophie…

• Pente de l'histoire

  Merleau-Ponty's term — first explicitly named at his Brussels conference "L'individu et l'histoire" (14 March 1946); first published in compressed form in Sense and Non-Sense's "Battle over Existentialism" (Les Temps modernes No. 2, Novemb…

• Perceptual Cosmogony

  Being is perceptual "all the way down." Merleau-Ponty's thesis that nature is "the primordial, the non-constructed, the non-instituted," and that every account of the origin of being is necessarily thought in perceptual terms. "If there is…

• Perceptual Faith

  Merleau-Ponty's name for "what is before any position, animal and... faith" — the structural openness upon a world that any thinking presupposes. Not "faith" in the religious or doxastic sense (a decision to believe), but a "deep-seated se…

• Perceptual Unconscious

  Merleau-Ponty's reinterpretation of the Freudian unconscious as perceptual consciousness itself rather than as a second thinking subject hidden behind consciousness. Developed in MP's 1954–55 Passivity course as a retention-and-correction…

• Period vs. Epoch (Péguy distinction)

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947 working political-philosophical distinction (borrowed from Charles Péguy) between two modes of historical time. In a period, political man administers established law and one may hope for a history without violence. In…

• Phantom Limb

  Merleau-Ponty's central case in Part One of Phenomenology of Perception for the irreducibility of bodily being to either objective causality (physiology) or cogitation (psychology). The amputee experiences the missing limb as present — can…

• Phenomenal Field

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the properly transcendental field that is neither an objective domain (science) nor an inner world (introspection) — the layer of "living experience through which other people and things are first given to us, the…

• Phenomenal Invariants

  Taddio's central technical term in Art and Psychology (2025): the relationship between dependent and independent variables — the conditions experimental phenomenology has identified as prerequisites for the appearance of a given phenomenon…

• Phenomenon of Truth

  Frank Chouraqui's technical term for what survives the critique of truth: not any truth-content, but the compelling experience of reality as real that makes truth-claims meaningful at all. "Belief in X is a taking-X-to-be-true, and a takin…

• Philosophical Praxis of Medicine

  Heinbokel's positive thesis (2021) for what medicine can become once its use of science is subjected to phenomenological analysis under the description "coherent deformation." Medicine, on this reading, is not a hybrid (a phenomenology and…

• Philosophy of Biology (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's philosophy of biology develops continuously from La Structure du Comportement (1942) through the Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) and the Nature lectures (1956–60, published 2003). The corpus articulates a third position — neith…

• Philosophy of Reflection

  Merleau-Ponty's name (la philosophie réflexive) for the family of philosophical positions running from Descartes through Kant to Husserl that take reflection — the conversion of perception into thought of perceiving — as the founding philo…

• Philosophy-Cinema / Philosophy-Screens

  A program, not a theory. The phrase philosophy-cinema is Deleuze's: "Together we would like to be the Humpty-Dumpty of philosophy, or its Laurel and Hardy. A philosophy-cinema" (Note to the Italian Edition of The Logic of Sense, 1974). Car…

• Play as Political Virtue

  Chouraqui 2025's name for the existential-attitudinal form of Merleau-Ponty's ethics: the practical virtue corresponding to hermeneutic freedom. Play is not the absence of seriousness; it is the higher seriousness that takes responsibility…

• Politics (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's political thought develops across Humanism and Terror (1947), the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), the inaugural lecture (1953), Signs (1960), and the late ontology of V&I and Eye and Mind (1959–61). T…

• Portance

  Saint Aubert's philosophical concept — effleurée but not thématisée in MP's late manuscripts — for the modality of being that bears and supports flesh while flesh surges from it. Announced as the subject of Saint Aubert's future post-exege…

• Positive Philosophy

  Schelling's late project (formally announced in the Berlin lectures of the 1840s, culminating in the 1850 Quelle) of going beyond what he calls Vernunftwissenschaft — merely rational science — by recognizing that thought is indebted to bei…

• Pre-objectivity

  The central concept of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the realm of experience prior to objective thought, which constitutes the deepest level of the subject's relation to the world. Pre-objectivity is not "blind" Kantian intu…

• Precession

  In Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy, precession names the pure principle of anteriority by which being always already precedes any constituting subject. The concept emerges from Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl's "Ur-Arche Earth Does Not…

• Pregnancy (Prägnanz)

  Borrowed from Gestalt psychology but radically redefined. For the Gestalt psychologists, Prägnanz names the tendency of perception toward "good forms" (symmetry, closure, regularity). For Merleau-Ponty, pregnancy means something ontologica…

• Primacy of Perception

  Merleau-Ponty's signature doctrine and the name of his 1946 address to the Société française de philosophie, the most compressed in-print statement of the Phenomenology of Perception's thesis. The "primacy" is neither a reduction of knowle…

• Primordial Expression

  Every human use of the body is already expression. This thesis, stated most explicitly in The Prose of the World, grounds Merleau-Ponty's entire theory of creative expression — painting, literature, speech, philosophy — in the body's capac…

• Primordial Symbolism

  Merleau-Ponty's term (symbolisme primordial) for the dream's non-coded, pre-predicative, positive symbolic operation — the mode of meaning-formation MP keeps from Freud after refusing Freud's own metapsychology of disguise. The term names…

• Principal Condition (Economic Determinism, MP's Reading)

  Merleau-Ponty's exact formula for the relation between economy and history in his sympathetic-from-the-inside reading of Marx: economic conditions are the principal condition of historical progress, but principal-condition is not cause-of-…

• Processioning (paysage)

  David Morris's neologism for the temporal-distributive structure of quantum-mechanical dynamics, replacing the wavefunction-realist image of "guiding-branching" as a process spatially distributed alongside the apparatus. In English, a "pro…

• Propaedeutic Dialectic

  The staged dialectical entry that Merleau-Ponty uses to introduce a phenomenological investigation into a subject area. The form: naïve attitude → first ill-judged universalism → objectifying scientific stage (yielding a "truth of objectiv…

• Prospective Activity of Consciousness

  Merleau-Ponty's term in Phenomenology of Perception (p. 241; see also p. 246) for the unique primary phenomenon at the foundation of his philosophy: the irreducible movement of consciousness toward the world, projecting a future and instit…

• Quasi-Natural Signification

  Merleau-Ponty's phrase at The Problem of Speech (PbP) p. 199, revisited in the third Nature course of 1959–60: an "order of quasi-natural significations" of language — the breakdown of the strict bifurcation between the natural sign (whose…

• Realism as a Well-Founded Error

  Merleau-Ponty's canonical formulation in The Structure of Behavior §"Truth of Naturalism" (raw 1984): realism is an error qua dogmatic thesis but a motivated one — "it rests on an authentic phenomenon which philosophy has the function of m…

• Realist Thought

  Merleau-Ponty's distinctive methodological diagnostic from chapter 7 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1951–52). Realist thought is the cardinal methodological error of classical psychology: it "cuts up and separates as well as distinguish…

• Recognition and Institution

  Chouraqui 2025's name for the structural form of agency in Merleau-Ponty's mature ethics: action is the simultaneous unity of recognition (taking the object as a standard, responding to what is) and institution (actively assigning meaning,…

• Redoubled Negation

  Merleau-Ponty's term for a negation that is inside being rather than opposed to it — "a more profound or re-doubled negation" (V&I 53–54). It names the negative that is concretely configured into the structure of sensation and significatio…

• Reprise

  The act by which a subject takes up again a past — neither repeating it nor leaving it behind — and so makes a future. Merleau-Ponty's signature concept across 1946–1955: the operative form of his philosophy of history, the structural rela…

• Retrograde Movement of the True

  Merleau-Ponty's term (borrowed from Bergson and radicalized) for the structure in which a new truth, once established, appears retrospectively to have been already present before its discovery — though it was not. "There is truly a retrogr…

• Reversibility

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the structural form of the chiasm — the reciprocal turning of seeing-seen, touching-touched, speaking-listening — and what he calls "the ultimate truth" of his late ontology (closing line of V&I Ch 4, p. 155). Cruc…

• Revolution as Another Stiftung

  The structural-parallel thesis — anchored in Merleau-Ponty's cardinal formulation at Institution and Passivity p. 13, "the very general sense of institution is not the opposite of revolution; revolution is another Stiftung" — that revoluti…

• Revolutions are True as Movements and False as Regimes

  The slogan-formula of the Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Merleau-Ponty's settled diagnosis of the revolutionary dialectic: revolutions enact a truth in their movement — the passage in which a fallen class no longer rules a…

• Saturated Attention

  "Saturated attention" is Frank Chouraqui's coinage for the perceptual-political mechanism by which legitimate political order operates: the active management of the perceptual / attention field so that the question of truth-grounding never…

• Schematisieren eines Chaos

  Nietzsche's account of knowledge, as read by Heidegger in Der Wille zur Macht als Erkenntnis (1939, heidegger-1961-nietzsche-i Part III): knowing is the schematizing of a chaos according to practical need. Knowledge is not correspondence t…

• Science as Coherent Deformation

  The application of Merleau-Ponty's coherent-deformation to the scientific gaze itself — and to scientific writings such as neuropsychological case reports — as a styled deformation of the world that opens a new field of investigations with…

• Science Secrète

  Merleau-Ponty's phrase from L'Œil et l'esprit (1961), placed at the structural pivot between §1's polemic against operational thinking and §2's phenomenology of the painter's body: "What, then, is this secret science which he has or which…

• Sedimentation

  Husserl's term, taken over and reinterpreted by Merleau-Ponty: the process by which an initially creative expressive act becomes a stable "acquired" meaning available to further expression. Sedimentation is the structural condition of all…

• Seinsgeschichte

  Heidegger's concept of the "history of Being" — not a chronicle of philosophical doctrines but the successive ways in which Being itself "sends" (schickt) itself, concealing itself in the very act of disclosure. As read by Merleau-Ponty, t…

• Self-Differentiation

  Frank Chouraqui's unifying term for the structure shared by Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty: the ability of reality to present itself as different from what it is, thereby — paradoxically — revealing its structure as self-differentiation. For…

• Self-Falsification (Being as)

  The ontological thesis of Chouraqui 2014: Being is not an entity that falsifies itself; Being is self-falsification. That is, Being is the movement by which pre-objective experience transforms itself into metaphysical error — by which the…

• Sense vs. Respect

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction between sens du réel (sense of the real) and respect du réel (respect for the real), drawn from "On Indochina" in Signs (p. 520). Chouraqui 2025 §3.1 foregrounds the contrast as the perceptual face of hermeneuti…

• Sensible Ideas

  Merleau-Ponty's reversal of Plato: ideas that are inseparable from the sensible appearances in which they are given, appearing not in an "intelligible sun" but as the "lining and depth" of the visible. The canonical passage is V&I Ch 4, pp…

• Shadow Philosophy

  The hermeneutic and critical method by which a thinker is read through the unthought philosophy within his thought — not the explicit doctrine the thinker states, but the other philosophy implied by his statements that he himself did not t…

• Silence

  Silence in Merleau-Ponty is not absence of language but its structural ground — the horizon from which speech emerges, the tacit dimension that makes the said possible. Across the corpus, silence names a family of registers (perceptual, pa…

• Soil / Ground / Sol

  MP's late register of sol / Boden / ground names the carnal-geological structural a priori of the late ontology — a non-categorial, non-ideal ground-as-sense that MP develops out of his reading of Husserl's Umsturz-fragment (Husserl's 1934…

• Speaking Speech and Spoken Speech

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction in Part One Ch VI of Phenomenology of Perception between parole parlante (speaking speech, the act of creative expression) and parole parlée (spoken speech, the sedimented cultural world of available significati…

• Specular Image

  The child's image of his or her own body in the mirror, taken by Merleau-Ponty in the 1950–51 Sorbonne lectures as the site where self-awareness, alienation, and the symbolic function converge. MP's treatment (Ch 4 §3 of Primacy of Percept…

• Spontaneity vs Liberty

  Sartre's 1961 formulation of the cardinal philosophical-genealogical pair distinguishing his own and Merleau-Ponty's mature thought from a common 1934 starting point. Both philosophers received Husserl's intentionality in the same year (19…

• Spontaneous Structuration

  Merleau-Ponty's name in the 1949–52 Sorbonne lectures for the body's positive-organisational power — neither innate idea, nor intellectual schema imposed on data, nor classical-physics composition of forces, but immanent self-organization…

• Stiftung

  Husserl's word — "foundation," "establishment," "institution" — for the operation by which a singular event (the Urstiftung) opens a temporal dimension along which subsequent experiences acquire meaning, are handed down (the Nachstiftung)…

• Strong Beauty

  Strong beauty is an event, not a quality — a radically unanticipable apparitional moment characterized by opacity, imprevisibility, and an intensity akin to pain. The concept, developed by Galen A. Johnson and Veronique Foti drawing on Mer…

• Sublime Point

  A figure Merleau-Ponty borrows from Breton and deploys recurrently in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) for the dreamed-of moment in which "matter and spirit would no longer be discernible as subject and object, individual and history, pa…

• Surrection

  A metaphorical figure developed in Merleau-Ponty's late work and analyzed extensively by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (Poetic of the World, Ch 2). Surrection names the vertical emergence through which desire's insurrections and resurrections d…

• Symbolic Matrix

  Merleau-Ponty's term for the structured existential field that a past event leaves behind in the subject, organizing subsequent perceptions without being a "content" of consciousness. "The unconscious is the symbolic matrix left behind by…

• Syncretic Sociability

  The pre-individual intercorporeal field that precedes and grounds personal existence. In Merleau-Ponty's 1950–51 Sorbonne course (The Child's Relations with Others, Ch 4 of Primacy of Perception) and the Institution course (1954–55), syncr…

• Système d'Équivalences

  Merleau-Ponty's phrase from L'Œil et l'esprit (1961) for the structural relation that holds between a painting and the world it brings to expression. The painting is "a system of equivalences" — its forms, colors, lines, and depths are not…

• Tacit Cogito

  Merleau-Ponty's name in Phenomenology of Perception for the pre-linguistic self-presence of consciousness that underlies the explicit Cartesian Cogito. Introduced in Part Three Ch I.o–p as the ground of the "spoken cogito" (the cogito one…

• Task of Thinking (Aufgabe des Denkens)

  Heidegger's late name for post-philosophical thinking — a thinking that is neither metaphysics nor science, preparatory not founding (vorbereitend nicht stiftend), abseits ohne Effekt (apart, without effect), gleichwohl von eigener Notwend…

• Texture imaginaire du réel

  Merleau-Ponty's cardinal formula for the ontological structure that the real itself is through and through woven with imaginary dimensions. Coined in L'Œil et l'Esprit (OE p. 24, 1961), the formula is the chapter-title and organizing thesi…

• The Absolute as Moral Catastrophe

  Merleau-Ponty's diagnostic that the philosopher's claim to Absolute Knowledge is not merely an epistemological error but a moral catastrophe whose political form is purges. Developed in Sense and Non-Sense's "The Metaphysical in Man" (Chap…

• The Antithetic Critique of Sartre

  Merleau-Ponty's diagnostic that Sartre's L'Être et le néant (1943) "remains too exclusively antithetic" — that Sartre presents the for-itself / in-itself and the for-myself / for-others relations as alternatives rather than as "the living…

• The Human Object

  Merleau-Ponty's term, attributed to Marx, for the cultural object as carrier of social meaning at the level of perception. The notion is given its concentrated statement in "Marxism and Philosophy" (Chapter 9 of Sense and Non-Sense, Revue…

• The Metaphysical in Man

  Merleau-Ponty's positive definition of metaphysics, developed primarily in the 1947 essay "The Metaphysical in Man" (Chapter 7 of Sense and Non-Sense, originally Revue de métaphysique et de morale July 1947). Metaphysics, for MP, is not me…

• The Metaphysical Novel

  Merleau-Ponty's coinage for the literary form proper to phenomenological-existential ontology. A novel is metaphysical not by stating philosophical theses but by making them exist for us in the way that things exist. The form is named in S…

• The Schneider Case

  The clinical case of Johann Schneider — a German soldier who sustained a brain injury from shrapnel in 1915 — that Merleau-Ponty uses as the methodological engine of Part One of Phenomenology of Perception. Schneider was studied from 1918…

• The Third-Year Crisis

  Merleau-Ponty's developmental account, in chapter 5 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1950–51), of the moment when the spectator-spectacle pair (formed in 6m–3yr syncretic-sociability) internalizes and the child becomes capable of represen…

• The Two Hegels (1807 vs. 1827)

  Merleau-Ponty's structural distinction between the Hegel of 1807 (the Phänomenologie des Geistes) and the Hegel of 1827 (the Encyclopädie + Philosophy of Right). Developed in the 1946 essay "Hegel's Existentialism" (Chapter 5 of Sense and…

• The Unthought

  Merleau-Ponty's meta-principle for reading the philosophical tradition, taken over from Heidegger's Der Satz vom Grund and applied in "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (1959). The "unthought-of element" (das Ungedachte) in a work is not wha…

• Three Orders of Signification (Physical / Vital / Human)

  Merleau-Ponty's ontological-pivot thesis in The Structure of Behavior Ch III: matter, life, and mind are not powers of being but three orders of signification, distinguished by the type of equilibrium each achieves and the kind of integrat…

• Théologie explicative (Saint Aubert)

  Saint Aubert's technical term — first in his 2008 Archives de philosophie article, then systematized in Être et chair II Ch VII § 3d — for the Leibnizian-Thomist theological position Merleau-Ponty targets across his late manuscripts. The t…

• Topology (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's topologie de la chair / topologie de l'être names the spatial-relational structure of late-MP being and flesh, articulated in roughly 80 attestations between October 1959 and September 1960 (working notes, Être et Monde feuillets, L'Œ…

• Transcendental Geology

  Giovanni Fava's elevation of a single late working-note phrase from Merleau-Ponty into the central interpretive paradigm of late MP's philosophy of nature: a philosophy capable of linking history to its ontological belonging to the Earth,…

• Transitivism

  Wallon's term, adopted by Merleau-Ponty in the 1950–51 Sorbonne lectures, for the child's (and, residually, the adult's) attribution to others of what belongs to oneself — or vice versa. The classic example: a child slaps her companion, th…

• Transtemporality

  Merleau-Ponty's late concept (occasional in the 1954–55 Institution and Passivity lectures) for the coherent coexistence of multiple heterogeneous temporalities on a single plane. MP defines it formulaically as "institution in its nascent…

• Trotsky's Horse

  A recurring image in Merleau-Ponty's writings on politics, drawn from Leon Trotsky and quoted at least four times in MP's Inédits 1946–1949 (Mimesis 2022; see Chouraqui 2025 §2.2 and footnotes 8–10): "one learns to ride a horse by mounting…

• True Humanism (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's "true humanism" / "humanisme réel" / "vrai humanisme" names a humanism without an a priori human substratum: humanity cannot be conceived prior to the practices of communication and communion. The locus classicus is the "Note on Machi…

• Truth of Objectivism

  Merleau-Ponty's phrase at The Problem of Speech (PbP) p. 57: the truth that the objectifying scientific stage of the propaedeutic dialectic yields, which the integrative recovery must preserve rather than discard. The structurally analogou…

• Two Historicities

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction (in Signs, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence") between two modes of historicity: (1) the cumulative historicity of advent, in which works communicate across time by the reactivation of their expressiv…

• Two Ways of Being Young

  Merleau-Ponty's typology of philosophical disposition, articulated in the addendum to the Preface of Signs (1960, pp. 34–35) and used by Sartre in his 1961 manuscript-draft eulogy (sartre-1984-merleau-ponty-vivant) as the structural heuris…

• Ultra-chose

  MP's ontological-phenomenological term for the modality of every perceived thing: irrécusable et inaccessible, given in flesh yet always held at a lointain. Borrowed from Wallon's 1945 developmental psychology (against Piaget's ideal of th…

• Ultra-things and Infra-things (Wallon)

  Henri Wallon's term, adopted by Merleau-Ponty in chapters 3 and 7 of Child Psychology and Pedagogy: cosmological horizons toward which no objective attitude is available, but which the subject does not doubt. Earth, sky, parents-of-parents…

• Ultrabolshevism

  Merleau-Ponty's coinage, in Chapter 5 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), for Sartre's position in Les Communistes et la paix (1952–54). Ultrabolshevism is Bolshevism without the dialectic: it keeps every Bolshevik demand (pure action,…

• Umdrehung des Platonismus

  Nietzsche's self-described project, recorded already in 1870/71: "Meine Philosophie umgedrehter Platonismus: je weiter ab vom wahrhaft Seienden, um so reiner schöner besser ist es. Das Leben im Schein als Ziel" (IX, 190). Heidegger reads t…

• Unvordenklich / Unvordenklichkeit

  Schelling's late term for being that "pre-dates thought, possibility, and the PSR" — being which cannot be thought away because thought itself arrives in possibility, and possibility presupposes this being. In Gardner's reconstruction, unv…

• Verflechtung

  Husserl's term (verflochten, "interwoven") from "The Origin of Geometry" (HUA 370), adopted by Merleau-Ponty in his 1959–60 course notes as naming the triadic interweaving of man, world, and language — "a thick identity which truly contain…

• Virtu (Merleau-Ponty's Machiavelli)

  Merleau-Ponty's redeemed reading of Machiavellian virtu in the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949, collected in Signs as "Note sur Machiavel") — not as the cynical political objectivism that Koestler diagnosed in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945)…

• Visible and Invisible

  The structural pair that gives The Visible and the Invisible its title and its central ontological problem. The invisible is not the merely-not-yet-seen (a hidden visible) and not the absolutely-other-than-visible (a Platonic transcendent)…

• Voir-Selon / Vivre-Selon

  Frank Chouraqui's systematized technical term for Merleau-Ponty's most accomplished formulation of pre-doxastic faith — a "style of seeing/living" that is partial both in its arbitrary focus and in its structural incompleteness, where beli…

• Volant (flywheel-of-inertia)

  MP's figure for the flesh that conjoins passivity and activity: a mass-in-rotation whose inertia sustains and relaunches a movement, with passivity in the service of élan. Saint Aubert (E&C II Ch I § 1b) excavates the figure as systematica…

• Vollendung der Metaphysik

  Heidegger's name for what Nietzsche's thought is: not the overcoming of Western metaphysics but its completion. Vollendung is the most load-bearing thesis of the Nietzsche I lectures (1936-1939) and the operative frame for Heidegger's read…

• Vortex / Tourbillon

  The vortex / tourbillon names a recurring spatializing-temporalizing rotational figure in late MP — the figure that distributes times and spaces without coinciding with any of them. MP uses tourbillon repeatedly in the V&I working notes an…

• Voyance

  Merleau-Ponty's technical term for the double sight by which vision sees farther than it sees — not a second faculty but the structure of all vision once philosophy takes seriously that "the invisible is the outline and the depth of the vi…

• Wahrheit als Gerechtigkeit

  Nietzsche's most extreme determination of truth, in his late notebooks: truth as Gerechtigkeit — justice as the fitting bestowal of constancy by the will to power. Heidegger reads this in Nietzsche I Part III as "der äußerste Wandel der me…

• Wild Being

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the brute, uncultivated, pre-objective Being that is the project's positive object — the Being that "objective philosophy" (Husserl's term) has covered over and that the late ontology aims to bring to expression. "…

• Wild Structure

  David Morris's name for quantum mechanical systems read as Merleau-Pontian structures operating in wild being — structures that generate their own time-orders rather than presupposing them. The qualifier "wild" applied to structure (not ju…

• Will to Power

  Nietzsche's name for the essential character of reality: "the world is will to power, and that alone" (BGE 36). In Nietzsche's texts it names at once a psychological principle (drives seeking their discharge), a biological principle (life…

• Winnicott's Transitional Object (Saint Aubert's Import)

  Donald W. Winnicott's psychoanalytic concept (1953) — the child's teddy bear, blanket, or thumb that is neither fully internal (fantasy) nor fully external (reality) but structures the aire transitionnelle in which creativity is born. Merl…

• Écart

  French for gap, divergence, spread, deviation, or deflection. Lingis's translator's footnote at V&I Ch 1, footnote 4: "Écart. This recurrent term will have to be rendered variously by 'divergence,' 'spread,' 'deviation,' 'separation.'" In…

• Épreuve mutuelle de la chair et de l'être

  Saint Aubert's organizing concept for MP's late ontology: perception is not a one-way relation (observer → observed) nor a bilateral relation (subject ↔ object) but a reciprocal testing (épreuve mutuelle) in which flesh and being evaluate…