Prefatory meditations

This essay purports to show that Merleau-Ponty's philosophical career was marked from its very beginning by doubt about the vocation of the phenomenologist to offer a description of lived experience that would reveal the coming into being of meaning before the objectifications and interpretations of natural science or the natural attitude. Like Schelling, Merleau-Ponty turns to the artist, to the painter, who, according to Merleau-Ponty, alone accomplishes the phenomenologist's epoché, who alone catches in her or his colors the opening of sensibility itself into the sensing and the sensed, the very coming to be of phenomenality itself, the epiphany of things. In trying to model his thinking after that which hefinds in painting, Merleau-Ponty runs up against the historicity of philosophical language, even the highly reformed language he proposes in his last works, a language that violates this epiphany of being.