I provide an explication of the content and method of Husserl’s phenomenology, explicating the ideas of bracketing and reduction and of descriptive, eidetic and transcendental phenomenology. In the process I set out his ideas of act intentionality, of co-intending and horizons and of active and passive constitution. I then give an account of how Merleau-Ponty adopts and adapts Husserl’s ideas and methodology, recasting phenomenology as an existential and genetic but nonetheless transcendental enterprise. I go on to outline his account of the scientistic and physicalistic picture of the world presented by what he calls objective thought, his major target from the outset. Against this backdrop, I show that he opposes objective thought because it either reduces consciousness to a physical body in a determined world (as empiricism) or takes it as something that acts from above on a physical and agency-neutral body in a similarly determined world (as intellectualism).

Here I commence my explication of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema. Our skills are deployed through this sub-reflective schema, which lies behind our pre-reflective or proprioceptive awareness of posture. I focus on his interpretation of the phenomenon of the use-phantom limb as silhouetting our ordinary performances because it is continuous with the rest of the body. Ordinarily our skilled readiness-of-hand and readiness-of-leg are not represented or objectified, not being thematic or focal powers of action. Rather they are ‘regions of silence’ that we take for granted. I show what the schema can exclude (inoperative areas of the body), what it can incorporate (implements it uses proficiently), and why it is an a priori condition of cognitive distanciation and of reckoning with the possible. We reckon with imagined actions that are immediate possibilities for us, and in the process we also draw on a reservoir of sedimented concepts and convictions.

I outline the theories of temporal awareness and existential temporality that Merleau-Ponty gets from Husserl and Heidegger and qualifies with his account of body temporality. This constitutes an efficacious past that inhabits the present without ever having been present to consciousness. I then set out his stories about the tacit and spoken cogito and about the concrete subject or person. I consider objections to the effect that his account of the embodied subject seems to cast it as an unceasing project of acquisitive appropriation, and that his view of the body is an idealisation from an ageist and ableist perspective. My response is that his story about appropriation is qualified for the most part, and that his theory can be reworked to escape the charges of idealisation, ageism and ableism. I conclude by suggesting that his notion of radical reflection brings out how phenomenology is of its essence revisable and its futures unforeseeable.

In this chapter, I set out Merleau-Ponty’s critique of intellectualism, which understands perception proper in terms of the top–down imposition of scientific and proto-scientific concepts on our sensory deliverances by way of judgements. Intellectualism begins with Descartes and is refined in parts of the B edition of Kants First Critique. The scientistic reading of Kant is propounded most notably by Léon Brunschvicg, one of Merleau-Ponty’s early teachers. I outline Merleau-Ponty’s critique, to the effect that intellectualism neglects pre-conceptual perception, motivated attention and action and our early and exploratory acts of learning. It also neglects the singularity of empirical things and of the somatically and cognitively constituting subject. I go on to show how Merleau-Ponty takes up ideas from Kant that are not tied to intellectualist suppositions, including the synoptic synthesis of apprehension, the schemas for pure and empirical concepts, orientation in space, the feeling of perceiving and the productive imagination.

In this chapter I traverse Merleau-Ponty’s account of language as the medium of thought, in which conceptual significations inhabit words instead of lying behind them (a mistake common to empiricist and intellectualist theories). We do not inspect an indicating word and indicated thing to reach a verbal signification. Rather we learn it as we learn to use a tool, by seeing it employed in a certain situation. Through the words that we utter we act and project action possibilities ahead of ourselves, as well as our attitudes towards these possibilities. Language is manifested as creative or speaking speech and as habitual or spoken speech. This explication is followed by an outline of Merleau-Ponty’s view of our affective lives in knowing, acting and loving, in which we always encounter others and things within a certain mood or mode of attunement, one that can widen or narrow down the world of possibilities.

I outline Merleau-Ponty’s critique of first-generation empiricism with its causal account of sensations of determinate qualities, which is rejected in favour of a figure background account that factors in our interests and our biological imperatives. I then show how he rejects a classical account of re-identification through associations based on the projection of memories. We do not associate past and present bundles of sensations, rather past and present configurations. I then run through his positive view of intersensory or intermodal perception, in which our senses work together from the outset because they are structured to do so. Finally I suggest how he would criticise the second-generation objective thought found in the contemporary physicalism that no longer posits unstructured sensations or externally related variables. He would show that our lifeworld, our responses to significant situations and our beliefs in proximate and distant action possibilities for ourselves and others are utterly ineliminable.

Here I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the way we experience others in and through their attitudes and engagements. I show how he rejects all accounts of originally experiencing of the other as an analogue, whether consciously or by way of analogical appresentation. He is keenly aware of the original and intercorporeal expressivity of others, in which our being animated is already our being expressive and in which our bodies can best be compared with works of art. What is expressed is inseparable from the way it is expressed. He goes on to show that our comportment at once expresses our unique styles and our original enculturation. Though we are exposed to the gazes of others, Merleau-Ponty makes a compelling case against Sartre that we can never be objectified as mere things. The experience of the other is of a unique and transcendent existent who can always shatter our preconceptions.

This chapter is devoted to Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentional movement as silhouetted by the Schneider case (that of an injured soldier suffering psychological blindness, cognitive rigidity and impaired motility outside habitual action situations). I show how Merleau-Ponty insightfully understands motor intentionality or motor projection as the work of the body schema organising both our postural changes and our phenomenal fields towards habitual or novel outcomes in a horizonal and context-sensitive manner. Without this sub-reflective projection of somatic action solutions and routes to realisation, we would have an agency-neutral body and a congealed spatiality. I maintain that imagined actions supposing skill transpositions can be extrapolated from Merleau-Ponty’s theory, showing that we are not locked into habitual actions or milieus. I go on to argue that he neglects little acts of reflection that compensate for threats to the flow of ‘skilled coping’, while contending that this shortcoming is easily rectified.

This chapter begins with an exposition of Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment, oriented around his fundamental distinction between the body as object and the body as lived. The lived body can only be apprehended as mine through the double-sided experience of touching and being-touched, and its movements are needed for the articulation of a three-dimensional spatiality in which we apprehend fully bounded things both far and near. Its kinaestheses or capacities for skilled movement also underpin the ‘I can’, the awareness of immediately available agency. I show what Merleau-Ponty takes up from Husserl and adapts for his own purposes, and go on to sketch out the influence of Jakob von Uexküll’s ethology and of Heidegger’s account of our being engaged in the world and being ahead of ourselves projectively. Against the backdrop of what Merleau-Ponty calls our intentional arc or fundamental function of projection, I give a preliminary overview of his positive account.