Book Excerpt: Merleau-Ponty on Forms in The Structure of Behavior
The following is a slightly edited excerpt from Chapter 6 in my book, Form Theories: From Aristotle to Merleau-Ponty (Stevens, 2024).
Idealism, Realism, and What Behavior Tells Us
Since beginning this book with Aristotle, we have explored a series of philosophers whose worldviews propose a middle path between the two poles of idealism and realism. Aristotle set himself in distinction from Platonism, which might be characterized as both idealistic and realistic. All through the history of philosophy, thinkers have grappled with questions of how things are objectively, in their innate nature, and how the mind constructs its reality subjectively. These are the fundamental questions which Merleau-Ponty explores in The Structure of Behavior, saying from the beginning of his book that he intends to understand the relations between “consciousness” and “nature.”[1] Kant is a ubiquitous figure looming over this book, whose spirit is invoked when the author mentions “critical philosophy” with its particular flavor of idealism.
In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty identifies a strong tendency toward realism in the fields of biology and psychology in his day. Their approach, as he characterizes it, was to look at organisms, including humans, as a heap of material parts, with separate formulaic mechanisms determining their processes, maybe with an entelechy to order the parts and give the organism a sense of grace and unity.[2] Merleau-Ponty characterizes this objectivistic view of science as existing entirely outside of a concept of “self,” entirely distancing from any hint of subjectivity. And he says the opposite of that tendency is a kind of pure consciousness of idealism— “the total presence of self to self,” and he asks if this separation and opposition of the two poles might be untenable.[3] When I think of the idea of panpsychism, this total presence of self to self seems like an apt characterization of a universal soul or an utterly autonomous consciousness.
But can this “realist” approach of science, with all its power and the enormity of its contributions to our knowledge of the universe, really claim the trait of pure objectivity? What would this actually mean? Merleau-Ponty writes, “[o]ne can wonder in all justice whether, in physiological knowledge, objectivity is not confused with the methods of physical and chemical measurement…”[4] He says, the sciences think of themselves as situated “in a ‘complete’ and real world without realizing” that the perspective, the “perceptual experience” required to do science, plays a crucial role in the construction of that very world.[5] Science’s consistency of measurements replicated time and time again is a marvel, and the importance of its work cannot be overstated. But the idea of a ‘pure objectivity’ deserves interrogation and precision.
From the outset of Merleau-Ponty’s book, it is clear that his thesis balances both subjectivity and objectivity. He does not go so far as to say the mind simply constructs reality and there is nothing beyond that. He is not properly in the Kantian camp. He says that objectivity and subjectivity both have importance. Lived perspective accounts for the construction of one’s reality, but also there is real encounter, meaningful sharing of signification from one being to another; he says “my perception accedes to things themselves;” it presents a world.[6] There is something out there that transcends me.
Like Goldstein suggested, Merleau-Ponty agrees that the field of biology, the study of organismic behavior, necessitates the use of subjective, psychological language about the organism. It cannot be an utterly objective, valueless field free of “signification.” Using language that talks about value, of subjective meaning, is necessary when studying and describing the behavior of an organism. This was Goldstein’s thesis. Merleau-Ponty shares his approach of first looking at the behavior of organisms—both animals and humans—in order to build up his own very similar thesis.[7] What do we learn when we simply try to observe and describe behavior?
Pavlov, he says, starts the same way—with a study of behavior, though he claims to be purely objective and physiological.[8] Merleau-Ponty suggests that Pavlov is not fully consistent or transparent in the fact that physiology alone is not capable of building a theory of human behavior. Pavlov’s method uses descriptive language that involves terms of value. Merleau-Ponty says that instead of pretending they do not use subjective values in their theory, such theorists should admit that we are engaging in a descriptive endeavor to accurately talk about the phenomena we observe in organisms, and to be descriptive of what we observe we will find ourselves using psychological language. So, this artificial separation between physiology and the mental, the psychological, needs to be reconciled. The behaviorists need to admit this.
If science were able to be truly objective, it would be able to just lay out the physiology, which would somehow be an assortment of piecemeal objects which added together would create human behavior. There was a trend, and there still is, which is characterized by the polarization between the study of physiology on one hand, which represents realism, and the study of the “mental” on the other, which represents idealism; consciousness separated from the physical.[9] But this is an impossible and unrealistic theoretical approach. We cannot learn about human beings simply through physiology, through a purely objectifying lens. And the mental does not exist without the physical.
Subjective, perceptual observation—the noticing of patterns—is necessary when talking about the nature of organisms. Language about value is necessary to describe the organism’s goal, or intentions, if we are to faithfully paint a picture of what we are studying, because each organism has self-organizing, self-regulating tendencies. There are whole-body processes coordinating across the organism in order to obtain what it seeks. Piecemeal, isolated objects do not really exist in the nervous system or in the human body at large. The organism must be studied as a whole subject, and one which is guided in its behavior by the meaning of its concrete situation in the world.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that if we are studying organisms, we will find that it is insufficient and incorrect to restrict our language to stimulus and response, cause and effect. We will want to talk about patterns—patterns we only observe through our perception and across time. But, he says, behaviorism focuses its theory on “effects,” not “norms.”[10] He paints a general picture of behaviorism, the “theory of conditioned reflexes,” as a theory dedicated to the organism as a mechanistic “apparatus” which will always work the same way given the same conditions. Quoting Kurt Koffka of the gestaltists, he says that from that behaviorist theoretical approach, an organism’s behavior is not seen through the lens of adaptation and relationship to the nature of the situation or even through the lens of instinct, rather it is reflexive activity which is determined by a kind of pressing a button to release a trigger response in the organism. He says this is a relationship between situation and response which is “contingent” and not “intrinsic.”[11]
Behaviorism is inadequate because its theoretical basis does not offer a full enough picture of an organism’s inner nature, its inner field with its ability to organize itself, its inner systemic structure as a dynamic unity. It does not offer a language to describe what we actually observe in organic life.
While he finds much value in the notion of the gestalt (I will say more about this in a few pages), Merleau-Ponty has some corrections he wants to give the gestalt theorists as well. He wants to draw the reader back to the origins of gestalt theory, which was the study of perception. We saw in the chapters on Brentano and Wertheimer that the origin of phenomenology, descriptive psychology, and gestalt psychology is the study of perception. Brentano asked, how are we to understand and talk about the object of perception, the phenomenon which we observe and toward which we are oriented? Whether it is something we are simply focused on or something we desire or hate, it is something we relate to with intentionality. Merleau-Ponty tells the gestaltists not to lose sight of this necessary standpoint of perception, just as he tells the behaviorists the same thing. We cannot get too drawn into the idea of a given world “out there” and forget about the perspective with which we relate to that orderly, given world that appears to us with a regularity, a structure of its own, an appearance of objectivity.
In the beginning of The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty uses the example of someone’s eyes being drawn to a spot of light. He asks, are we to believe that the eyes are utterly passive in being drawn to that spot, or does the subject have an active part to play in that brief, momentary action? He suggests in this book that the gestaltists became so engrossed in the idea that the world is structured, orderly and given that it is mostly a question of the passive subject receiving the figure formed ‘out there’ in the world. Merleau-Ponty is asking us to be mindful of the both/and of the figure/ground. There is a figure arising in the perception, yes. But it is connected always with its ground. It is not a completely separated object. That is not how the world works. There are fields within greater fields, wholes within other wholes. (I will talk more about this idea also in a few pages.) The very basis of gestalt psychology and phenomenology is the idea of a perceiving subject and the role that subject plays (its agency) in the formation of the object in its perception. Merleau-Ponty builds up the first portion of his book talking about organismic behavior, but this book is more fundamentally a book about perception.
Any quest to study organisms, whether in biology or psychology, must accept that it involves perception from the get-go, because a pure physiology without an observing subject doing the studying is nonsense, just as a theory of an organism without some kind of inner nature is nonsense. In other words, Merleau-Ponty has laid groundwork in the early chapters of his book that suggests it is incoherent to separate the physical from the mental and to paint a picture of organisms as empty, mechanistic automatons.
Perception of Phenomena
Like Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty accepts that according to the principle of figure and ground there are “gestalts,” wholes which have meaningful separation from their ground while not being absolutely distinguished. In the nervous system, in the brain, there can be localizations. These localized phenomena are still part of one whole, and they cannot be truly separated. Perspective is what allows for any gestalt to exist as such; it is what allows the phenomenon to appear.
Merleau-Ponty says perspective is not a “subjective deformation of thing,” but rather it is what allows for there to be a thing with its own hidden richness. It is because we cannot see all sides of it and all levels of it at once that it appears as a “thing.”[12] Something perceived is both presented as “in itself,” with an interior I cannot exhaust, and as “for me,” given in a personal experience in a frame-by-frame, present-moment encounter.[13]
He says that the word “phenomena” is the perfect word to use for this both/and, a word for a thing with an innate relation to the subject and a thing that also has its own inner structure.[14] Phenomenology is the part of philosophy that has its attention on this topic. In a way, this is fundamental to the entire field of philosophy, focusing on the very same set of questions Plato and Aristotle concerned themselves with regarding the mind, wholeness, being, and causality. Phenomenology and metaphysics are concerned with largely the same questions.
Merleau-Ponty wants to embrace phenomena as such, and he characterizes science as being fundamentally unfriendly to this proposal. He says in the scientific approach in his day, everything must be founded in “things,” in a res which is an object that exists according to “realistic analysis.” But this leaves no space to talk about “intention or utility or value” because these are subjective terms and thus, are not permitted.[15]
Perceptual behavior, as science studies it, is not defined in terms of nerve cells and synapses; it is not in the brain or even in the body; science… can understand it only as a dialectic, the moments of which are not stimuli and movements but phenomenal objects and actions.[16]
He also says that there is more nuance needed between the extremes of blind automation/reaction to stimuli on one hand and intelligent, calculated, logical activity on the other.[17] Phenomena also include the objects of intentionality which arise in our “least conscious” activity. Our lives are filled with instances of intuitive or naïve consciousness, which is conjured not only by external stimuli but by our inner structure/field. There is a consciousness which, though primitive, can still rightly be called consciousness and not merely “reflex.” Merleau-Ponty is raising our awareness of a middle way, the way that the subject’s inner sense of directedness, or intentionality, is at play not only when it is forming conscious thoughts but any time it has a feeling or sense perception. Our experience of an excitation, though originating “out there” in the world, is also in its very origination something that the subject constitutes through its own action. He says the experience of a color or understanding a word, immediate experiences, are “actively constituted” by the subject “at the very moment of perception.”[18]
An analysis which would try to isolate the perceived content would find nothing; for all consciousness of something… as soon as it is identifiable and recognizable, for example, as a ‘color’ or even as ‘this unique red,’ presupposes the apprehension of a meaning through the lived impression.[19]
Through this lens, an experience of being drawn to a spot of light then becomes an activity of the subject as well as a reaction to an external stimulus. Looking at clothing laying on the bed becomes a flash of awareness of how that shirt might look on me, its existence as a use-object.[20] Hearing a word becomes a personal association of meaning which it holds for me. I am not simply receiving the ‘form’ of a thing into my mind/consciousness, I am co-creating that form with my mind/consciousness in the span of an instant before I have had the time to form a coherent “conscious” thought. One might call this level of consciousness or intentionality “naïve consciousness,” primitive or “intuitive perception.” It also can be described as lived or direct experience.
Contrasting this lived experience with the knowledge of Descartes’ cogito, Merleau-Ponty highlights that a cognitive, calculated kind of knowledge arising from the cogito accounts for the subject’s mental existence, but it does not account for “existential knowledge.” A disembodied cogito cannot access existential experience. This is the connection between phenomenology and embodied “existence” in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenological work. Rather than the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of phenomena is rooted in the co-creation of the phenomena by the embodied subject. An object of perception is not delivered wrapped in a box and opened up at the moment our cognition clicks into place, nor is it unlocked by transcendentally tapping into a pure, unfiltered “essence,” it is actively constituted at the immediate moment of perception in a mutual engagement of the inner field of the subject and the outer field of the “world.”
In a way, the phenomenon is the bridge that spans the two fields of the subject and its environment, it is both what distinguishes them as separate, and it is what allows for their relationship, as one systemically united field. This language about fields, inner and outer structures, is a good segue to introduce Merleau-Ponty’s use of the concepts of “form” and “structure” in his book.
Forms as Structures and Levels; Physical, Vital, and Human Forms
The concept of “gestalt,” meaning structured form, is what Merleau-Ponty proposes as a key concept in answer to the metaphysical and phenomenological questions he raised in the early chapters of his book.[21] He defines forms as “total processes whose properties are not the sum of those which the isolated parts would possess.”[22] He also calls them “functional structures.”[23] He also says they are systems where any change in one part of the system has effects on other parts of the system. He says the term form is descriptive of “certain natural wholes.”[24] Like Goldstein, we will see that Merleau-Ponty uses his terminology descriptively and without wanting it to carry teleological connotations. Merleau-Ponty says that rather than dabbling in metaphysical speculation, he is using the word “form” because it is simply the best descriptive term to describe the “nature” or the tendency over time that an organism displays; it has certain preferences, “preferred behavior.”[25] Merleau-Ponty is of the opinion that using the term “preferred behavior” to describe an organism’s nature is just as scientific and “objective” as we can hope to be, if we are to actually describe what we observe. There is coordination and organization across the whole organism.
This is the basic concept of an emergent level or property—we can look at a dog as a collection of atoms, of elements, of muscles and bones, or we can call it a dog. All of these levels tell us something true about its various systems. But depending on what phenomenon we are describing, talking about a “dog” will sometimes be the most scientifically, descriptively accurate way of putting into words what the dog is doing, when it is carrying out a performance which is coordinated across the whole organism and not merely a localized reflex. Form, in his definition, “possesses original properties with regard to those parts which can be detached from it,” just as an emergent level is defined as having a different property than its constituent “parts.”[26] I talk about this in my concluding remarks of this book.
It is form or structure which is the best term to describe this coordination of a whole, unified system. An organism shows preferred behavior which does not simply arise from a stimulus-response. He says, “local specificity” in the nervous system is assigned by the “structure of the whole;” in other words, the whole determines the parts.[27] Just like Ehrenfels and Wertheimer, Merleau-Ponty uses the example of a melody to communicate the idea of the form. It is the relation of the notes which form the melody; it is transposable.[28] This is the idea that the form is primarily the relationship of the parts, not the concrete parts themselves. It is the function of the system. Even in the inorganic realm there are systemic relationships and coordination which looks a lot like wholeness.
A ‘form,’ such as the structure of ‘figure and ground,’ for example, is a whole which has a meaning and which provides therefore a base for intellectual analysis. But at the same time it is not an idea; it constitutes, alters and reorganizes itself before us like a spectacle. The alleged bodily, social and psychological ‘causalities’ are reducible to this contingency of lived perspectives which limit our access to eternal significations.[29]
A form has an innate kind of nature, an immanent relationship among its parts; it has an inner structure which is not totally constructed by the perceiving subject’s mind. It has inner organization and can change before us. It has “eternal significations.” Like Goethe said, to fully pursue a particular is to trace its ultimate connections to the infinite edges of the universe which utterly transcend our comprehension. It is because of the position and limitations of the perceiver that it appears as a form; ultimately it is connected to the rest of the universe. This concept of form is a both/and that acknowledges the objectivity of an inner structure or nature and the subjectivity which delineates that form out of all of the connected forms in which it is nested. So, Merleau-Ponty says, a form is necessarily an object in perception.
Thus form is not a physical reality, but an object of perception; without it physical science would have no meaning, moreover, since it is constructed with respect to it and in order to coordinate it.
Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty says, forms are not “defined in terms of reality but in terms of knowledge.”[30] He suggests that physics, the science which is most concerned with ‘objective’ laws, is only concerned with expressing and determining perceived things.[31] He says a given law is “only possible within a de facto structure,” a structure which is nested within a greater web of relations.[32] Laws are a way to conceptualize what is perceived, and any kind of knowledge is attached to a situation; a “sensible or historical given.”[33] Every law, as far as we know, is attached to its perceiving subject and to its spaciotemporal context. We do not know any law to be truly universal, though many hope a universal theory or law will one day be found.
The issue Merleau-Ponty has with the concept of “physical gestalt” proposed by Kohler and the gestalt theorists is that it does not articulate fully enough the distinction between emergent levels. The orders of the physical, the organic, and the mental are not merely “parallel” forms; to say so is simply to reduce the mental to the physical. If the physical level is “gestalt-identical” to the mental, as Max Wertheimer once put it, that is just to say that there is no difference in the properties of the mental and the physical, or between the organic and non-organic.[34] The concept of a form is tied to the property of the phenomenon witnessed. So, then, this conceptualization they alluded to about physical gestalts is really just the idea that it is only physical forms, or “physical gestalts” which exist. Merleau-Ponty corrects this imprecision in the gestaltists’ theory which I think they might not have truly wanted to imply. He says that his correction is simply carrying their very own theoretical principles further than they did, and this does seem to be the case.
In my reading, Merleau-Ponty is very much in the spirit of the gestalt theorists like Max Wertheimer, but he and Goldstein made valuable corrections that elevate their theory and develop it more thoroughly. Merleau-Ponty states that the notion of form, or the gestalt, leads to recognizing “different types or levels of integration.”[35] A form is not just an accumulation of parts, it is the integrated systemic unity, the emergent level which has properties distinct from those of the parts which are on a different level. These levels are integrated, they are not in any opposition, as Goldstein said. They arise through each other. Yet they can be distinguished in one’s perception of phenomena. Merleau-Ponty recognizes that this kind of theory is what gestalt theory stood for: “Gestalt theory stands at an equal distance from a philosophy of simple coordination and a romantic conception of the absolute unity of nature.”[36] This is the balance emergentism strikes, between an absolutism of monism and an absolutism of reductionism which sees reality as existing at just one level, not a multi-leveled, emergent universe. Gestalt theory and emergentism both, in their fundamental concepts, resist absolutism.
Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior talks about three general levels of structure or form: the physical, the vital, and the mental (human).[38] He also calls them matter, life, and mind. The merely physical forms are the least integrated, least autonomous forms. They depend most on the situational perspective of the perceiver and on the environmental conditions which determine their unity. Their flux is more rapid. Organic life—organisms—are more integrated, with incredible complexity from plants to humans. We are still learning today about the extent of plant life’s complexity. Merleau-Ponty takes up Goldstein’s ideas on what distinguishes the human level of forms, characterizing them as the “mental” level. He explicitly mentions Goldstein when he attributes to humans the “essence” of “orienting oneself in relation to the possible,” transcending their immediate environment.[39] Humans, through their mental abilities, can think about possibilities, strategies, and guiding values which help them persevere through adversity in a way that animals do not have the depth of consciousness to do. Humans can transform the symbols they engage with into signification, they can transform the meaning of the things around them through mastery, not just through association of symbol and response. They take possession of the world, the milieu around them, and they can transform it through their own meaning making. They experience the highest level of autonomy of all forms. Like Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty rejects that humans are simply animals with an extra ingredient of consciousness added in, rather the human level of form is a different level of integration and a different system than that of other organisms. We did not retain the very same bestial tendencies as other creatures and add in something extra on top. The entire arrangement is a “different degree of integration” than the system of a different species.[40]
Merleau-Ponty spoke of definitive differences between humans and other animals, and while in his written works he did not expound in-depth thoughts about the Neo-Darwinism of his era, he echoed Goldstein’s resistance to Darwinian evolution at least insofar as it posed certain philosophical implications. For much more on Merleau-Ponty and Darwinism, see Darian Meacham’s “Sense and life: Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature and evolutionary biology.”
According to Merleau-Ponty’s gestalt, emergentist system of thought, he says that “structure is the fundamental reality.”[41] The structure of a living being’s behavior is the object of the study of biology. It is not a question of “objective” parts, the reduction of reality to only one level. All levels are as real and significant as the others, it is merely a question of which level corresponds as relevant to the phenomena perceived. Which substrate and systems are important to talk about given the situation or scientific task at hand? We perceive an organized, integrated system of an organism as a whole, based on its coordinated behavior which we observe, which was Goldstein’s thesis.
If the phenomenon perceived is that of an organism with living powers, locomotion, digestion, growth, unity, or consciousness, then we say that it is living, and its integration might be described as having a soulfulness or an essence which persists over time. But this is not to assert that there is a fundamental level of matter which exists in its own unity and onto which a soul has been added. And it is not to say that its essence is somehow absolute. He says, “only a disintegrated consciousness can be paralleled with physiological processes, that is with a partial functioning of the organism.”[42]
Merleau-Ponty, following in the same spirit as Goldstein, rejects parallelism of body and soul as if they are two different, aggregate components of one being which mystically run in unison. Rather, the organism is one whole system of integration; it is not reducible to an aggregate of body and soul, of matter and form.
[I]t is not a duality of substances; or, in other words, the notions of soul and body must be relativized. Each of these degrees is soul with respect to the preceding one, body with respect to the following one.[43]
The organism is an irreducible unity, in other words it is a phenomenon which is not reducible to a “lower” level of reality or lower-level components merely aggregated together. To assert this is to assert that abstractions are real. He says, to inquire as to a problem of consciousness versus physical matter is to ‘confusedly adhere to abstractions.’[44] We can speak relatively and descriptively but not absolutely about the role that a lower level of form plays for a higher, emergent level of form, or about different phenomena which appear as distinguishable components.
In this way of speaking, we can reclaim Aristotelian ideas of substrate, hierarchy of matter and form, and potentiality and actuality. Substrate, or any level which is seen as a “lower level” than another, can be called the matter in its relationship to a higher level which can be called the form. The same substrate—atoms and elements—do represent potentiality and depend on their systemic relations in order to turn into various “actualized” forms.
On the same page, he says relations of soul and body are a problem to be solved only “as long as the body is treated in abstraction as a fragment of matter.”[45] This is the kind of confusion we saw when Aristotle, Averroes and Aquinas referred to the body as pure matter. Matter, prime matter, was conceptualized according to Aristotle as representing substrate. A body is not purely potential substrate, it is a unified whole in its own right. But we can indeed talk about matter as substrate in a very meaningful way if we simply adapt the spirit of nominalism and accept the role of language and perception in the creation of forms. Things go a lot smoother and fit together with less mental gymnastics if matter and form are simply relativized concepts applied at any given level of phenomenon. Any higher emergent level can be called “form,” or actualization, in relation to a lower level which can be called its “matter,” or potentiality. Lower level phenomena are (in a way) the ingredients for the higher level forms.
Aquinas shows what happens when Aristotle is taken literally with absolutism, and Merleau-Ponty shows what happens when Aristotelian principles are taken as being descriptively useful. Matter and form can be meaningful abstractions, which distinguish various levels or things with different properties, but they are not absolute.
Vitalism is rejected by Merleau-Ponty to the extent that it shares the tendency to isolate abstractions like ‘vital force’ or consciousness from physical matter.[46]
Hegel’s influence on The Structure of Behavior is the last point I’ll make on this work. Since I have not done any proper studies of Hegel, I’ll keep my remarks brief. The reader encounters the words “relation” and “dialectic” a number of times in the work, in some pivotal lines.[47] I am unsure of his exact intentions when he chose these words, but we do see a quotation in the last few pages of the book which says, “…the notion of Gestalt led us back to its Hegelian meaning, that is, to the concept before it has become consciousness of self.”[48] Merleau-Ponty’s thesis seems to be related in important ways to Hegel’s work. To offer some context, Merleau-Ponty published an essay titled “l'Existentialisme chez Hegel" in Les Temps Modernes, April 1946 in which he states that “all great philosophical ideas of the past century… had their beginnings in Hegel,” including phenomenology.[49] He acknowledges in that essay that there are “many Hegels,” many readings of Hegel, but he interprets Hegel to be an existentialist. It is, of course, interesting that much of The Structure of Behavior is a resistance against idealism just as much as it is against realism, at least in my reading. I will also explore this interesting connection between the two thinkers in the next section. Others who are more familiar with Hegel may be able to dive deeper than I can into the meaning Hegel’s work held for Merleau-Ponty in The Structure of Behavior and later works.[50]
Footnotes:
[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 3.
[2] Merleau-Ponty, 3.
[3] Merleau-Ponty, 10.
[4] Merleau-Ponty, 59.
[5] Merleau-Ponty, 219.
[6] Merleau-Ponty, 219.
[7] Merleau-Ponty, 4.
[8] Merleau-Ponty, 60.
[9] Merleau-Ponty, 4.
[10] Merleau-Ponty, 9.
[11] Merleau-Ponty, 35.
[12] Merleau-Ponty, 186.
[13] Merleau-Ponty, 186.
[14] Merleau-Ponty, 199.
[15] Merleau-Ponty, 9.
[16] Merleau-Ponty, 205.
[17] Merleau-Ponty, 40.
[18] Merleau-Ponty, 88.
[19] Merleau-Ponty, 200.
[20] Merleau-Ponty, 88.
[21] Merleau-Ponty, 206-7.
[22] Merleau-Ponty, 47.
[23] Merleau-Ponty, 87-88.
[24] Merleau-Ponty, 51.
[25] Merleau-Ponty, 51.
[26] Merleau-Ponty, 91.
[27] Merleau-Ponty, 79.
[28] Merleau-Ponty, 87.
[29] Merleau-Ponty, 224.
[30] Merleau-Ponty, 143.
[31] Merleau-Ponty, 144.
[32] Merleau-Ponty, 141.
[33] Merleau-Ponty, 145.
[34] Merleau-Ponty, 136.
[35] Merleau-Ponty, 91.
[36] Merleau-Ponty, 43.
[37] Merleau-Ponty, 43.
[38] Merleau-Ponty, 203.
[39] Merleau-Ponty, 175-56.
[40] Merleau-Ponty, 203.
[41] Merleau-Ponty, 209.
[42] Merleau-Ponty, 204.
[43] Merleau-Ponty, 210.
[44] Merleau-Ponty, 204.
[45] Merleau-Ponty, 204.
[46] Merleau-Ponty, 46, 201.
[47] Merleau-Ponty, 184: “the ‘physical,’ the ‘vital,’ and the ‘mental’ do not represent three powers of being, but three dialectics”; 201, 204.
[48] Merleau-Ponty, 210.
[49] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “l'Existentialisme chez Hegel (Hegel's Existentialism)" in Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. H. and P. Dreyfus, (Northwestern U.P., 1964).
[50] There are also many references to Hegel in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s work in Sartre’s essay in memoriam, “Merleau-Ponty Vivant.”