Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and Sartre

Phenomenology is a mode of philosophizing that aims to capture and articulate the original meanings of direct experience. It is motivated by a desire to look at the world afresh from the perspective of first-person, pre-reflective, ‘lived’ experience. As such it has a close affinity with art. Merleau-Ponty puts it thus: phenomenology “consists in re-learning to look at the world . . . [it] is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being” (Merleau-Ponty 1998: xx).