The temporality of Merleau-Ponty’s intertwining

In his last work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty explored the fact that we believe that perception occurs in our heads (“in the recesses of a body”) and, hence, assert that the perceptual world is “in” us, while also believing that we are “in” the world we perceive.  In this article, I examine how this intertwining of self and world justifies the faith we have in perception. I shall do so by considering a number of examples.  In each case, the object “in itself” will turn out to be neither within us nor outside of us, but rather at the intersection set by the intertwining. I will then turn to what this disclosure of this object reveals about human temporality and, indeed, about human being as a place (or “clearing”) that permits disclosure.