Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy and his subsequent ontology can be characterized as a continuous attempt to disclose and resolve the tensions secretly polarizing Husserl's phenomenology. In his last work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty concentrated on how those same tensions insidiously entered his own thought in his earlier masterwork Phenomenology of Perception. In the "Preface" to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty asserts that the phenomenological reduction is best expressed by Eugen Fink as wonder. Merleau-Ponty argued that, unless the transcendental phase of the reduction, the epoche, i.e., the 'putting out of play' or 'bracketing' of the familiar world, takes place also as a lived experience that evokes a feeling of wonder at the strangeness and mystery of the world, the transcendental reduction would amount to a mere academic exercise of suspending the judgments of the natural attitude.