ABSTRACT
Merleau-Ponty’s central original idea about perception is that it is not just contingently but essentially a bodily phenomenon. Perception is not a private mental event, nor is the body just one more material object set alongside others. We lose sight of perception itself when we place it on either side of a sharp distinction between inner subjective experiences and external objective facts. In its most concrete form, perception manifests itself instead as an aspect of our bodily being in the world. Interior and exterior, mental and physical, subjective and objective—such notions are simply too crude and misleading to capture it. For perception is both intentional and bodily, both sensory and motor, and so neither merely subjective nor objective, inner nor outer, spiritual nor mechanical.
