Time and the Body: The Development of Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Embodied Consciousness and Temporality

Author

• Michael Timm, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

5-1-2026

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

Stikkers, Kenneth W.

Abstract

Much Merleau-Ponty scholarship available today fails to adequately attend to his lectures at the Collège de France. To understand the development of his philosophy of embodied consciousness and temporality, this dissertation systematically situates the periods of the Phenomenology of Perception and the Visible and the Invisible with respect to Merleau-Ponty’s Collège de France lectures. By developing his notions of “institution,” “passivity,” “nature,” and “flesh” at the Collège de France to describe how the past remains in being and efficacious in the present, Merleau-Ponty overcomes in the Visible and the Invisible the residual Husserlian, synthetical intellectualism of the Phenomenology of Perception, which would seem to place consciousness outside the world and the body, existing in their fundamental temporality. The embodied consciousness and temporality of the Visible and the Invisible’s philosophy of “flesh” is a present primed with the sedimented being of every “instituted,” “passive,” and “natural” layer of a past both “genetic” and “generative.” Though others have pointed out that in turning towards the ontology of the Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty seeks to overcome a Husserlian synthetical account of constitution from the Phenomenology of Perception, none have done so by systematically demonstrating how this turn is accomplished through the lectures at the Collège de France.