What Is Intentionality?

Merleau-Ponty’s most important contribution to philosophy is his phenomenological account of perception and embodiment, which he argues are not mere properties of minds or subjects, but constitutive elements of our being in the world. Contrary to what philosophers have sometimes supposed, we have no clear notion of ourselves at all as mere souls or minds in abstraction from our bodies and perceptions. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty believes, there cannot be a mind or a subject without some form of bodily-perceptual orientation in a world. Being embodied and perceiving a world are part of what it is for us to exist at all. Why does Merleau-Ponty suppose that phenomenology can help establish this kind of ontological claim concerning our existence? Isn’t phenomenology just a description of experience, of subjective appearance as opposed to objective reality? How can the mere description of appearances demonstrate anything about the world itself and our place in it? To answer these questions, we need to know more about how Merleau-Ponty understood phenomenology, what he thought phenomenological descriptions are descriptions of, and more specifically what aspects of perception and embodiment he thought they could shed light on.