Abstract

In this paper I show how Merleau-Ponty comes to identify the natural attitude and the original experience of the world, thus distinguishing his approach sharply from Husserl’s. I conduct my analysis along the line of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of some fundamental concepts in Husserl’s phenomenology. In particular, I identify the origin of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective in his ontological interpretation of the Husserlian concepts “empirical” and “transcendental”. This move entails an implicit ontologization that undergirds his late endeavors towards a new ontology. Merleau-Ponty considers the phenomenological couple empirical/transcendental as a reformulation in a “post-substantialistic” key of Descartes’ conceptual pair res extensa/res cogitans, also recast in terms of matter/spirit and, with a small but not irrelevant semantic shift, fact/meaning. In the paper I show how on this ground Merleau-Ponty can come to affirm the insuperability of the natural attitude and the correlative impossibility to transcend original experience.