In 1933 Heidegger became a member of the Nazi party, although he denied any direct involvement with the regime. However, after the war, he was accused of promoting Nazism and his philosophy was rejected by large numbers of academics. As a result, Heidegger’s influence declined sharply, although his ideas were picked up by a number of philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Michel Foucault. Existentialism developed in France during the 1950s and 1960s and influenced numerous writers and artists. It did not gain widespread acceptance until the 1970s.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an important French philosopher, applied the systematic methods of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology to examine subjective experience. His work continues the tradition of the great German philosophers Kant and Hegel. Like Kant, Merleau- Ponty argues that we cannot know anything about the world except through our own senses. Unlike Kant, however, Merleau-Ponty does not argue that our knowledge comes from sense experience. Instead, he argues that we experience ourselves directly. We are aware of ourselves as individuals, not just as an object among other objects. We are not simply passive observers of the world around us. Rather, we actively participate in creating meaning from our experiences. While we may be conscious of ourselves as subjects, we are also objects of our consciousness. This means that our experience of the world is always mediated by our particular perspectives, which arise out of our personal histories.
