A number of recent discussions of Merleau-Ponty in the Anglophone tradition have drawn comparisons to contemporary debates about enactive theories of perception

This paper has two aims. The first is to use contemporary discussions of naïve realist theories of perception to offer an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception. The second is to use consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception to outline a distinctive version of a naïve realist theory of perception. In a Merleau-Pontian spirit, these two aims are inter-dependent. Merleau-Ponty’s aim in the Phenomenology of Perception is to argue that we are embodied subjects, embedded in the world. This account of beings-in-the-world is intended to overcome two pervasive distinctions: between Empiricism and Intellectualism on the one hand, and between Subject and Object on the other. Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied subjectivity attempts to steer a middle way between the extremes of Empiricism and Intellectualism. Empiricists, like psychologists and philosophical naturalists, attempt to explain subjects and subjectivity in purely causal terms. Intellectualists, by contrast, treat subjects as either non-physical entities that coexist with purely physical objects (as Descartes and Cartesians suggest), or else as acosmic transcendental Egos—or as Merleau-Ponty often refers to them, ‘constituting consciousnesses’—that exist outside of physical space and time (as Kant and postKantian Idealists suggest). Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied subjects as essentially embedded, meanwhile, attempts to dissolve the sharp distinction between conscious subjects and physical objects. From an ontological point of view, perceiving subjects are not immaterial, and objects are not merely physical; rather, perceiving subjects are bodily subjects, and the things that appear to us in perceptual experience are ‘burdened with anthropological predicates’ (PP 334). From a phenomenological point of view, self-awareness through the ‘body schema’ already implies awareness of our environment. We are not aware of ourselves in merely ‘positional’ spatial terms: that is, as one object amongst others located in objective space. Rather our awareness of ourselves involves a kind of ‘situational spatiality’. We are aware of ourselves as body-subjects through being aware of the ‘milieu’ in which we situated, and the possibilities for action that this milieu affords (PP 102); as such, Merleau-Ponty argues that ‘the “body schema” is, in the end, a manner of expressing that my body is in and toward the world’ (PP 103). This account of our nature as embodied, embedded subjects in turn grounds Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception: as he says in the Introduction to Part II of Phenomenology of Perception, having outlined his account of the body in Part I, ‘The theory of the body is already a theory of perception’ (PP 209).