ABSTRACT
The path Merleau-Ponty followed from the development of a phenomenology of embodied perceptual consciousness towards a phenomenological ontology, with all its attendant themes, is an example of highly original philosophical thinking which, quite rightly, has attracted, and continues to attract, a good deal of serious inquiry. Merleau-Ponty pursues a discussion in which he explains how philosophy's role is precisely to help us to see more clearly the world in which we live, by elucidating such concepts as freedom, and by clarifying how freedom, as he has described it, is involved in our choices and our acts, and in the commitments we make in our lives. Merleau-Ponty's description of embodied subjectivity's essential freedom, and his contention that 'my freedom and that of the other are established together throughout the world', are central pillars of the humanist political thought that he would go on to develop in the months and years following the completion of the Phenomenology.
