Maurice Merleau-Ponty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The question is large, so let me enter it at the place where the work actually begins: the return to the perceived world. Philosophy, as I have practiced it, starts from a dissatisfaction with what I call objective thought — the assumption, shared by both empiricism and intellectualism, that the world is already a collection of determinate objects and that perception is either the causal registration of their stimuli or the constituting work of a transcendental consciousness.
Both accounts begin too late. They presuppose the world as constituted and then ask how a subject takes it up. The fundamental philosophical act, as I put it in Phenomenology of Perception, is rather to return to the lived world beneath the objective world — to the perceptual field as it actually presents itself before any scientific or philosophical reconstruction of it.1
The body is the pivot of this return. It is not an object among objects; it is the medium through which I have a world at all. When I reach for something on the table, my hand is already oriented toward it; the body schema — the pre-objective postural unity of the lived body — has organized the situation before any conscious deliberation. The body, by withdrawing from the objective world, carries with it the intentional threads that unite it to its surroundings and that reveal, in the end, the perceiving subject as well as the perceived world.2
The phantom limb shows this clearly: to retain a phantom arm is to remain open to all the actions of which the arm alone is capable, to stay within the practical field one had prior to the mutilation — a fact that neither physiology nor psychology, taken separately, can explain.3 Perception itself, on this account, is neither passive reception nor active synthesis.
Every perception is a communication or a communion, the taking up of an alien intention, or inversely the coupling of our body with things.4 The sensible is already relational in this sense, and the relation is not one-way: the seer belongs to the visible, the toucher to the tangible. This is what the late work — the manuscript I am still writing — tries to articulate under the name flesh and chiasm.
Flesh is not matter, not mind, not the body as Descartes conceived it; it is the sensible in the twofold sense of what one senses and what senses, the elemental medium in which the distinction between subject and object has not yet hardened.5 Mind, on this view, is the other side of the body — not a separate substance but what the body opens onto when it overflows its own objective description, anchored in the body and yet exceeding it toward a depth that is not that of extension.6
The return to perception is not, however, a retreat from language and thought into some pre-linguistic immediacy. The symbolic dimension is already present with perception; we find embedded in speech and thought the forgetting of the link to the flesh that always accompanies our faith in the world, and to recover the memory of this link is simply to acquire the power of interrogating the movement we carry toward being.7
Science itself, when it attempts to integrate the body into the objective world, is expressing, in its own way, the suturing of the phenomenal body onto the primordial world — it does not escape the perceptual ground it works from.8 What the whole project refuses, then, is the Platonic inversion that my interlocutors sometimes accuse me of reversing too naively: the move by which philosophy takes its departure from the insufficiencies of lived perception in order to arrive at an intelligible world satisfying to reason.9
I do not deny that the insufficiencies are real. But the intelligible world constructed to resolve them floats free of the perceptual ground that alone gives it purchase. The flesh of the world — that pregnancy of possibles, that Weltmöglichkeit — is not an object, not a blosse Sache; it is precisely by the flesh of the world that, in the last analysis, one can understand the lived body, the body applying itself to the rest of the perceived and treating itself as a perceiving.10 That circularity is not a defect to be corrected. It is what the phenomenon shows.
The 'fundamental philosophical act would thus be to return to the lived world beneath the objective world.'Phenomenology of Perception, p. xl
the body, by withdrawing from the objective world, will carry with it the intentional threads that unite it to its surroundings and that, in the end, will reveal to us the perceiving subject as well as the perceived world.Phenomenology of Perception, p. xl
To have a phantom limb is to remain open to all of the actions of which the arm alone is capable and to stay within the practical field that one had prior to the mutilation.Phenomenology of Perception, p. xl
every perception is a communication or a communion, the taking up or the achievement by us of an alien intention or inversely the accomplishment beyond our perceptual powers and as a coupling of our body with the things.Phenomenology of Perception, pp. xxv–xxvi
The essential notion for such a philosophy is that of the flesh, which is not the objective body, nor the body thought by the soul as its own (Descartes), which is the sensible in the twofold sense of what one senses and what senses.The Visible and the Invisible, p. 259
Define the mind as the other side of the body... The 'other side' means that the body, inasmuch as it has this other side, is not describable in objective terms... and at the same time needs it, terminates in it, is anchored in it. There is a body of the mind, and a mind of the body and a chiasm between them.The Visible and the Invisible, p. 259
we find embedded in speech or in thought the forgetting of the link to the flesh that always accompanies our faith in the world. To recover the memory of this is simply to acquire the power of interrogating the movement we carry toward being in itself.Phenomenology of Perception, pp. xxv–xxvi
when science attempts to integrate my body into the relations of the objective world, it does so because it attempts, in its own way, to express the suturing of my phenomenal body onto the primordial world.Phenomenology of Perception, pp. xxv–xxvi
Far from wanting to return to an immediate perception, to a lived perception, he took his point of departure in the insufficiencies of this lived perception in order to arrive at a conception of the intelligible world which was coherent, which satisfied reason.PART I, pp. 48–49
The flesh of the world is of the Being-seen... it is by it that we can understand the percipere: this perceived that we call my body applying itself to the rest of the perceived, i.e. treating itself as a perceived by itself and hence as a perceiving.The Visible and the Invisible, p. 250