ABSTRACT
The history of being is the generous explosion of body and soul, nature and spirit, earth and sky. The history of cultural expression is intensifying, deepening astonishment in the face of the "there is." The notion of vertical history that Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed in his last writings is, in the first instance, a critique of the teleological conception of historical progress, of the Endstiftung. Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness as weIl as his philosophy of history developed in The Crisis of European Seiences guided Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Percepiion, forgetting is unexplained. In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty discussed Husserl's phenomenology of internal time-consciousness and the 1905 diagram of the sedimentation of retentions within living presence. Merleau-Ponty's fundamental model for understanding the subject-object relation in perception was the reversibility relation. Merleau-Ponty's ontology is a monism. Visibility requires contact of seer and seen.
