ABSTRACT
Merleau-Ponty helps us to understand how the body provides our only means of having a world, and of achieving what he called that ongoing 'gearing of the subject into his world that is the origin of space'. In this formulation, why embodied experience was so fundamental to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and why it should also be of interest to anyone concerned with the understanding and organization of space. The distinctive aspect of Merleau-Ponty's approach, one that he shared with Martin Heidegger, was to recognize that knowledge, in fact, begins in the realm of embodied experience and only later does it become available to intellectual classification. The novelty of Merleau-Ponty's approach was to propose a more primary form of awareness: a bodily intentionality that provides initial grasp or sense of a situation, allowing us to cope with the ongoing flow of experience. Merleau-Ponty the body schema is a complex network of interrelated patterns.
