Problem: Background: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (French: [moRis meRlo poti]; 14 March 1908 - 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, and politics. He was on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine established by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world.
Context: Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between primary and secondary modes of expression. This distinction appears in Phenomenology of Perception (p. 207, 2nd note [Fr. ed.]) and is sometimes repeated in terms of spoken and speaking language (le langage parle et le langage parlant) (The Prose of the World, p. 10). Spoken language (le langage parle), or secondary expression, returns to our linguistic baggage, to the cultural heritage that we have acquired, as well as the brute mass of relationships between signs and significations. Speaking language (le langage parlant), or primary expression, such as it is, is language in the production of a sense, language at the advent of a thought, at the moment where it makes itself an advent of sense.  It is speaking language, that is to say, primary expression, that interests Merleau-Ponty and which keeps his attention through his treatment of the nature of production and the reception of expressions, a subject which also overlaps with an analysis of action, of intentionality, of perception, as well as the links between freedom and external conditions.  The notion of style occupies an important place in "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence". In spite of certain similarities with Andre Malraux, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes himself from Malraux in respect to three conceptions of style, the last of which is employed in Malraux's The Voices of Silence. Merleau-Ponty remarks that in this work "style" is sometimes used by Malraux in a highly subjective sense, understood as a projection of the artist's individuality. Sometimes it is used, on the contrary, in a very metaphysical sense (in Merleau-Ponty's opinion, a mystical sense), in which style is connected with a conception of an "uber-artist" expressing "the Spirit of Painting". Finally, it sometimes is reduced to simply designating a categorization of an artistic school or movement. (However, this account of Malraux's notion of style--a key element in his thinking--is open to serious question.)  For Merleau-Ponty, it is these uses of the notion of style that lead Malraux to postulate a cleavage between the objectivity of Italian Renaissance painting and the subjectivity of painting in his own time, a conclusion that Merleau-Ponty disputes. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is important to consider the heart of this problematic, by recognizing that style is first of all a demand owed to the primacy of perception, which also implies taking into consideration the dimensions of historicity and intersubjectivity. (However, Merleau-Ponty's reading of Malraux has been questioned in a recent major study of Malraux's theory of art which argues that Merleau-Ponty seriously misunderstood Malraux.) For Merleau-Ponty, style is born of the interaction between two or more fields of being. Rather than being exclusive to individual human consciousness, consciousness is born of the pre-conscious style of the world, of Nature.
Question: Who influenced his views the most?
Answer: 

Problem: Background: Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 - August 12, 1982) was an American film and stage actor with a career spanning five decades. Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl.
Context: Born in Grand Island, Nebraska in May 1905, Henry Jaynes Fonda was the son of printer William Brace Fonda, and his wife, Herberta (Jaynes). The family moved to Omaha, Nebraska in 1906.  Fonda's patrilineal line originates with an ancestor from Genoa, Italy, who migrated to the Netherlands in the 15th century. In 1642, a branch of the Fonda family immigrated to the Dutch colony of New Netherland on the East Coast of North America. They were among the first Dutch population to settle in what is now upstate New York, establishing the town of Fonda, New York. By 1888, many of their descendants had relocated to Nebraska.  Fonda was brought up as a Christian Scientist, though he was baptized an Episcopalian at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Grand Island. He said, "My whole damn family was nice." They were a close family and highly supportive, especially in health matters, as they avoided doctors due to their religion. Despite having a religious background, he later became an agnostic. Fonda was a bashful, short boy who tended to avoid girls, except his sisters, and was a good skater, swimmer, and runner. He worked part-time in his father's print plant and imagined a possible career as a journalist. Later, he worked after school for the phone company. He also enjoyed drawing. Fonda was active in the Boy Scouts of America; Teichmann reports that he reached the rank of Eagle Scout. However, this is denied elsewhere. When he was about 14, his father took him to observe the brutal lynching of Will Brown during the Omaha race riot of 1919. This enraged the young Fonda and he kept a keen awareness of prejudice for the rest of his life. By his senior year in high school, Fonda had grown to more than six feet tall, but remained shy. He attended the University of Minnesota, where he majored in journalism, but he did not graduate. He took a job with the Retail Credit Company.
Question: what is an interesting fact about his early life?
Answer:
Despite having a religious background, he later became an agnostic.