"Merleau-Ponty aims at a special kind of reduction - a return to the perceptual pre-conceptual experience of the child."
"Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis is on the inseparability of self and
world."
"In general terms, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical outlook may be characterised as a kind of dialectical naturalism, though he himself does not employ the word ‘naturalism’ which he associates with various forms of biological reductionism and scientism. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s outlook is naturalistic in that it sees human beings as integrated into the natural order,
as fundamentally belonging to the world, though not merely as objects in the world as their presence generates the social world of culture."
"This emphasis on the interwoven tapestry of the world and the body (a conception itself derived from Husserl who frequently speaks of the ‘interweaving’, Verflechtung, of self and world) leads Merleau-Ponty to be a constant critic of any form of Cartesianism which radically divorces consciousness from the world. Indeed, MerleauPonty sought to rescue Husserl’s phenomenology from its apparent commitment to Cartesianism, as evident in the Cartesian Meditations and elsewhere, which emphasised the sense of the world as a product of a disembodied transcendental ego. In place of the traditional Cartesian picture of body as res extensa, having parts outside parts with no interior, and of mind as res cogitans, wholly present to itself without distance, MerleauPonty wants to present a more complicated picture based on the more ambiguous way of existing of our own body (PP 198; 231). For MerleauPonty, Descartes, while he acknowledged the union of body and soul, had no proper means of thinking about that union and preferred to consider the concepts of ‘body’ and ‘mind’ as separate