ABSTRACT
At the start of the last chapter I mentioned that Maurice Merleau-Ponty belongs with Sartre at the forefront of those who wanted to conceive the work of Husserl and Heidegger as inaugurating a new movement in philosophy. For Merleau-Ponty, this movement is bringing phenomenology into being as a distinctive ‘doctrine or philosophical system’.1 Out of the mists of an ‘inchoate’ emergence it has come to have a ‘unity’ sufficient that it ‘can be practised and identified as a manner or style of thinking’.2 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty regards himself as writing at a time in which it has finally become possible to engage with some confidence with the question of what phenomenology is. MerleauPonty’s response to this question is presented as the Preface to his major work Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and I will begin this chapter by taking a look at some of the issues raised by this prefatory text.
