ABSTRACT
It is still matter of course today to regard the history of phenomenology, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in terms of the steady emergence of a distinctive philosophical ‘doctrine or system’;1 a way of going on in philosophy with a ‘unity’ sufficient that it ‘can be practised and identified as a manner or style of thinking’.2 While this conception may have taken time to take hold, it did not slowly dawn as a movement gradually took shape and grew. On the contrary, it belongs to the inaugural elaboration of philosophy as phenomenology in the work of Edmund Husserl. Husserl sought to present his work as an outset that would found a movement of just the sort that Merleau-Ponty describes.
