ABSTRACT
Ludwig Wittgenstein offers an account of human experience as solipsistic, which explains the connection Maurice Merleau-Ponty identifies between solipsistic experience and perspective. It is important to note that alternative notations are not competing hypotheses that explain the same set of data. For example, there are two main theories concerning the extinction of the dinosaurs. One theory states that this happened quickly as a result of a cataclysmic event. Merleau-Ponty, like Wittgenstein, identifies the subject with a point of view on the world. But unlike Wittgenstein, he pays close attention to the experience of one's own body, and it is this which mitigates the solipsism that flows from being a perspective on the world. There is clearly an essential connection between one's body schema and the physical object that is one's body. However, if body schema simply tracks and reflects one's physical body, then it is unclear how it could be transferred to another person.
