Why did Merleau-Ponty reject the traditional separation of mind and body?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejected the traditional separation of mind and body—often characterized as Cartesian mind-body dualism—because he viewed such dualistic analyses as inadequate for understanding human experience.1

Instead of treating the mind and body as distinct entities, Merleau-Ponty grounded his philosophy in the phenomenology of the "lived body"—the body as it is both experienced and as it experiences the world. He argued that the perceiving subject is "incarnated" within the world, serving as the essential mediating link between consciousness and reality.2

By emphasizing the "primacy of perception," Merleau-Ponty maintained that human experience is inherently perspectival and world-bound. Because our cognitive experience requires a body positioned in space, we can never achieve a complete, objective conceptualization of the world; rather, we are always essentially involved in it. This approach allowed him to move beyond the rigid dichotomies of traditional philosophy, such as the split between idealism and realism, by showing that consciousness and the world are reciprocally related through the body.12