ABSTRACT
The present chapter is concerned with Merleau-Ponty’s account of the world and its relation to consciousness. Merleau-Ponty takes his conception of them to preserve the insights of Empiricism and Intellectualism, whilst overcoming the difficulties inherent in these views. Empiricism and Intellectualism conceive of the world in the same way – as a collection of determinate, externally related entities – but differ in the ontological status they accord it. Their respective claims about the ontological status of the world are bound up with their conceptions of how the world is related to consciousness. Empiricism claims that the world exists in-itself. Its nature and existence do not depend on consciousness, which is just one of many physical things within it. Intellectualism, in contrast, takes the world to be constituted by – and so dependent on – a Transcendental Ego, which lies beyond the world and is wholly different from it. Merleau-Ponty holds that these two extremes are the only positions available if the world is conceived as a collection of determinate, externally related entities. He claims that, by rejecting Objective Thought’s conception of the
world, he is able to develop an alternative view of its ontological status and its relation to consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s aim is to show that consciousness and the world are mutually dependent – that is, internally related – parts of a single whole. Neither consciousness nor the world can exist without standing in this relation to the other. The claim that there is a Transcendental Ego which is independent from, and constitutes, the world, and the claim that there is a world-in-itself, which exists independently of consciousness, should both be rejected. He writes, ‘[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the world is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects’ (MerleauPonty 1945: 491; 1962: 430; 2002: 499-500).
