DE Weekly: Merleau-Ponty, Behavior, & Sedimentation
Below is an archived email originally sent on May 19, 2025.
Merleau-Ponty, Behavior, & Sedimentation
In existentialism, as in any philosophy, there are established truths which are endorsed by most of its influential thinkers. The absurdity of life, the acceptance of death, and the ability to make our own meaning are some examples of this. Sedimentation is another.
Along the same vein as facticity, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, sedimentation is a concept that represents another force in our lives that influences the way we live and interact with the world around us.
It was Maurice Merleau-Ponty who coined the term in his book Phenomenology of Perception.
Merleau-Ponty was another twentieth-century French philosopher heavily influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, and thus in the same class of philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre.
Much like Sartre, he, too, did not call himself an existentialist, but his book Phenomenology of Perception is a masterpiece of the genre, and so for our purposes today we’ll review his contributions to existentialism.
Merleau-Ponty used the term “sedimentation” to describe the manner in which our choices and our actions become ingrained in our lives, and how they shape our behavior in the future. He described this process as taking in information (either consciously or subconsciously) with our bodies in a way that allows us to “act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought.”
Practically speaking, Merleau-Ponty saw sedimentation as a phenomenon that helped shape our understanding of the world and motivate our intentions. He also believed it became more and more fixed over time, making it harder to deviate from established behavioral patterns.
Like a flowing river accumulating particles and mineral deposits that direct its flow of water, Merleau-Ponty argued, we too accumulate “sediment” in the form of information and influences. And this information builds a bedrock of what makes us us, guiding our behavior in the future.
In this way sedimentation could be seen as a force acting upon us from the outside without us even knowing, with an inertia powering it which makes it hard to resist.
It’s exactly this view of sedimentation that throws a wrench in things, so to speak, when we talk about making our own choices and seeking to live a life of our own making.
Sartre acknowledged that sedimentation upset the apple cart of radical freedom, stating that while we may be free to choose, our choices might be subconsciously influenced by internalized behavior we don’t even know we have.
Sedimentation, then, is like facticity––in fact, it’s a sort of facticity on top of facticity.
If facticity refers to the inescapable facts of our existence from the moment we are thrust into the world (our birthdate, birthplace, physical appearance), then sedimentation refers to the inescapable forces of the world and of the Other that seek to act upon us without our knowing.
As serious as this sounds, however, it’s important to understand that this doesn’t mean our lives are out of our control.
Facticity might be the foundation of our essence, but it is not a determinant of how our lives will play out.
Thus, sedimentation might be constituted by the forces and expectations that make up our behavior, but that doesn’t mean we are beholden to it and cannot change it.
This is where transcendence––the idea that, despite facticity and sedimentation, we can go beyond our limitations and our past to create a new life––must be considered.
Merleau-Ponty saw that stereotypes, both societal and on the individual level, play a part in sedimentation. This is true both for stereotypes that are true, and for ones we might not agree with.
For example, Merleau-Ponty suggests that stereotypes commonly found in the media we consume and in popular representations of cultures can actually become sedimented and impact our worldview.
Even if we don’t agree with something we see or are told, it could subconsciously change our perception of the world and, to some extent, our behavior and the way we act.
In practice, this could look like what Simone de Beauvoir wrote about in The Second Sex: gendered sets of goals and values and different, predetermined expectations for boys and girls.
In the extreme, this could reflect the theory put forth by Jean Baudrillard in his Simulacra and Simulation.
Both de Beauvoir and Baudrillard are deserving of their own discussions, at a later time.
For now… where then, do things stand in reality?
My inclination is to think long and hard about how well you know yourself––who you really are, deep down.
What experiences have you had that played a big part in how you ended up? What behaviors do you have that might be ingrained, that influence the decisions you make (and you may or may not have noticed before)?
What makes you you?
The silver lining in all of this is, while they certainly understood its limiting factors, the existentialists did not believe sedimentation was a be-all and end-all of life’s trajectory.
We are not marionettes on strings controlled by ideas or by the Other. We are human beings––individuals––with desires and drives and a hopeful destination of our choosing.
We can reason what matters to us and what does not. We can change our environment and we can change ourselves.
We can overcome sedimentation as a roadblock and build upon its foundation a life of meaning.
“Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.” –– Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I just purchased a new haul of existentialist literature I’m going to start reading in the near future. Hopefully some more good ideas come from them. Any recommendations you’d like to hear me discuss one day, let me know.
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