Merleau-ponty and the Phenomenology of the Body

By using the term ‘phenomenology’, Merleau-Ponty locates his work in the philosophical tradition effectively founded by Husserl, and implicitly endorses the latter’s opposition to scientific realism, to the view that one should accept the privileged status of the natural sciences as providing descriptions of the real nature of the world, however much these depart from our pre-scientific, common sense conceptions of it. By contrast, Husserl maintains that the ‘real’ world is a world of phenomena, i.e. of things that appear to us; but not of ‘appearances’, in the sense of that behind or beyond which lies ‘the real’. Nor are those ‘phenomena’ the sense-data of empiricism: colour-patches, shapes, sounds, and so on. Rather, they are the objects as they appear to us, objects-for-consciousness. And conversely, our consciousness is (always) of objects: it is ‘intentional’, aimed or directed at something.