Mead and Merleau-Ponty

Book excerpt: This book unites George Herbert Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in a shared rejection of substance philosophy as well as spectator theory of knowledge, in favor of a focus on the ultimacy of temporal process and the constitutive function of social praxis. Both Mead and Merleau-Ponty return to the richness of lived experience within nature, and both lead to radically new, insightful visions of the nature of selfhood, language, freedom, and time itself, as well as of the nature of the relation between the so-called "tensions" of appearance and reality, sensation and object, the individual and the community, freedom and constraint, and continuity and creativity.