ABSTRACT
To understand the notion of consciousness in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty two things are important to note. First, consciousness, in his analysis, is primarily perceptual consciousness. He doesn’t deny that consciousness is also involved in other modes of cognition, but, like other phenomenologists, he gives primacy to perception. ‘Every consciousness is, to some extent, perceptual consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 416). His focus on perceptual consciousness, however, is tied to his insistence that one cannot consider consciousness in abstraction, as an entity in or for itself apart from an embodied existence in the world: ‘we must no longer conceive of it as a constituting consciousness and as a pure being-for-itself, but rather as a perceptual consciousness, as the subject of a behaviour, as being in the world or existence’ (ibid.: 367). Second, in thinking about consciousness and perception one has to think at the same time of the non-conscious, pre-personal background that includes features of embodiment. Moreover, the line between the non-conscious and the conscious remains ambiguous. To be clear, this ambiguity belongs to the phenomenon itself rather than to MerleauPonty’s analysis. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis clearly points to an ambiguity that characterizes the relational nature of consciousness.
