ABSTRACT
Maurice 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. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is an attempt to free perception from understood semantic-representational paradigm by insisting on the literal rightness of our naive understanding of intentionality as orientation in and directedness toward the world. In spite of its undeniable debt to Edmund Husserl, that is, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological project turns out to be, in both method and substance, deeply at odds with that of the movement’s founder. Merleau-Ponty’s position is likewise ambivalent with regard to the transcendental reduction, or epoche, that is, the move from the external world to pure consciousness, or transcendental subjectivity. The phenomenal field is consequently elusive, precisely because its function is to draw us out into the world.
