Introduction

Abstract

Ever since the beginning of the modern phenomenological movement disciplined attention has been paid to various patterns of human experience as they are actually lived through in the concrete. This has brought forth many attempts to find a general philosophical position which can do justice to these experiences without reduction or distortion. In France, the best known of these recent attempts have been made by Sartre in his Being and Nothingness and by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception and certain later fragments. Sartre has a keen sense for life as it is lived, and his work is marked by many penetrating descriptions. But his dualistic ontology of the ensoi versus the poursoi has seemed over-simple and inadequate to many critics, and has been seriously qualified by the author himself in his latest Marxist work, The Critique of Dialetical Reason. Merleau-Ponty’s major work is a lasting contribution to the phenomenology of the pre-objective world of perception. But aside from a few brief hints and sketches, he was unable, before his unfortunate death in 1961, to work out carefully his ultimate philosophical point of view.