Merleau Ponty’s Body of Work as a Developing Whole

This essay attempts to counter the claim that there is a significant shift or even a break in the body of Merleau-Ponty’s work, one that dramatically moves from a focus on perception to a focus on language. This break proves to be untenable for the following reasons: The early studies of perception do not disregard the importance of language. The later studies of language do not disregard perception and are purposely taken up to help more fully enlighten the importance of the earlier works. The relatively recent appearance of Merleau-Ponty’s later Nature reveals that the author returns to earlier ontological studies in order to develop them more fully, and that he does so, in part, to more fully understand the emergence of human perception and its connection to language.