ABSTRACT
The writer who most successfully analyses experience in phenomenological terms, as ‘open’, is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his Phenomenology of Perception of 1945. It is a work which goes far beyond what its title would lead us to expect, and is in fact a phenomenology of experience and consciousness. Merleau-Ponty may be said to conceive man and his world as standing in a relationship of mutual ‘participation’, though he does not use Lavelle’s term. Perception is a means of being in the world, and as such it is not necessarily an explicit and deliberately thematic act,5 it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them.
