SOURCE: Said, Edward W. “Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” Kenyon Review 29, no. 1 (January 1967): 54-68.

[In the following essay, Said explores Merleau-Ponty's place in post-1930s French philosophy.]

According to Emile Brehier, the distinguished philosopher and historian of philosophy, the major task faced by French thinkers of the early twentieth century was to re-situate man in what he aptly describes as “the circuit of reality.” The theories of which Bergson and Durkheim, for example, were heirs had isolated man in a limbo, in order that “reality,” or whatever was left when man was lifted aside, could be studied. Mechanism, determinism, sociologism: a variety of sometimes simple and sometimes ingenious keys kept unlocking doors that led further away from what philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre were later to call “lived”—as opposed to general, universal, abstract or theoretical—“life.” The discrediting of these “isms,” which began as a useful polemic, has, since the middle '30s, become a sophisticated and frequently tangled strand of intricate philosophizing, not without its moments of fatuous elegance (at which the French are masters) but more frequently studded with works of enduring importance. Whether it calls itself Marxism, existentialism, or phenomenology, the thought of this period (from about 1936 onward) almost always concerns itself with concrete situations—a key phrase—rather than with abstractions, with precise methodology but not with universal principles. Somehow, it manages also to be highly adventurous and speculative and yet markedly anti-theoretical, a paradox that keeps occurring to the reader for whom antitheses of this sort are still novel and troubling. Moreover, even the Marxists (the best of them, that is) join in attacking the doctrine of simple causation, a doctrine that satisfies no one and often arouses ridicule because of its pallid rigidity. All in all, causation, abstract theory, and “unsituated” discussion are as irrelevant as possible to the generality of recent French thought. Their uselessness to this thought is best illustrated by the way in which Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise is invalidated by actual motion.

The fall of France in 1940 considerably strengthened the impulse to discredit mechanistic or reductive philosophy, and generated an impatience with a sort of ossified precision that seemed incapable of touching man. What had previously been a debate between professional philosophers turned into almost national reaction to a social, spiritual, moral, and even military posture that was simply not ready for the brutalities of history. In a sense, the mode of philosophy changed from inbred professionalism to humanistic amateurism. The war caught up and made overt what had been stirring beneath the surface of French life, the conflict between what M. Bréhier calls the stability of principles and the shifting variety of human experience. Like the Maginot Line, these fixed principles buckled as the waves of an onrushing and terrible experience assaulted them with catastrophic effect. It is ironic, of course, that German thought—that of Marx, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger in particular—played a considerable part in the intellectual turnabout. For what these philosophers brought to the attention of their French disciples was an awareness that the starting point of any philosophical enterprise is man's own life, which can neither be left unexamined nor conveniently herded under some theoretical rubric. A corollary to this notion is one with which current Anglo-Saxon philosophy, normally hostile to the style of Continental philosophizing, concurs: the central importance of language to human experience. In a sense, philosophy has passed from the study of economic-behavioral-psychological man to the study of linguacentric man. Immanence—or the meaning embedded in human, lived reality—is now the central theme of French philosophy, and in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty it has received extraordinarily rich, passionate, and complex treatment.

Like his long-time friend Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was a pre-war normalien who then did the usual tour of pedagogic duty at a provincial lycée before military service in 1939. During the war, he worked with the Resistance while teaching philosophy at the Lycée Carnot. In 1945, with Sartre, he founded Les Temps Modernes and contributed unsigned as well as signed political and philosophical articles to it until the two men broke with one another: their friendship, according to Sartre, was difficult and very often strained. Sartre, incidentally, wrote a remarkable portrait of Merleau-Ponty just after the latter's death in 1961; not only is it the most interesting and personal study of Merleau-Ponty but it is Sartre at his best, complex and clear at the same time, full of sympathy and a kind of baffled understanding for his problematic subject. One wonders how two such different men could have been friends for so long (Sartre suggests coyly that what kept them together was his great respect for Merleau-Ponty—who, he says, had achieved maturity and had “learned history” sooner than his fellows). They complement each other: Sartre with his expansive genius, pushing out in form after form, restlessly exploring one literary and philosophic mode after another; Merleau-Ponty with his brooding, concentrated power of mind, gathering in his experience and his thoughts, his writing becoming more and more dense, its texture thicker and tighter. Both are great synthesizers, but Sartre's style is essentially centrifugal, Merleau-Ponty's centripetal. Their disagreement in 1950 reached a climax during the Korean war. Merleau-Ponty, ever a stoic realist, became convinced that words meant nothing (he said he would commit suicide now by going to New York to work as an elevator boy). Naked force had been let loose. Sartre, though plainly discouraged, was still hopeful that voices could be raised in protest and discussion.

Between 1945 and 1953, Merleau-Ponty taught for a time in Lyons, and at the Sorbonne. In 1953, he was made professor at the Collège de France; the chair he was given—he was the youngest man ever named to it—had previously been held by Bergson and by Etienne Gilson. Merleau-Ponty died suddenly in 1961 at the age of fifty-three, his work, at least as he had sketched out its future outlines, only begun. His death came eight years after his mother's when, by his own admission to Sartre, one-half of his life had been destroyed. Furthermore, he claimed never to have recovered from an incomparable childhood. Sartre surmises that Merleau-Ponty's incurable dislike of the philosophy that is practiced as an elevated survey probably was derived from his desire to investigate man's preconscious history, his natal attachments to the world. This is not as fanciful a conjecture as it sounds. For Merleau-Ponty's central philosophic position, insofar as one can be articulated for him, is that we are in and of the world before we can think about it. Perception, to which he devoted his major philosophic labors, is a crucial but complex process that reasserts our connection with the world and thereby provides the basis for all our thought and meaning-giving activity. This, put very simply, is what makes him a phenomenologist. His aim is to rediscover experience at the “naïve” level of its origin, beneath and before the sophisticated encroachments of science. Phenomenology approaches experience as a novelist or poet approaches his subject, from within, but it is not at all anti-scientific; on the contrary, its aim is to put science on a proper footing and to restore it to experience.

On the surface, Merleau-Ponty's life seems to have been relatively uneventful, and therefore of little interest to the student of his thought. But, as Werner Jaeger showed in his magistral study of Aristotle, one of the most significant aspects of a philosopher's work is the connection between the development of his thought and the tenor of his life. Merleau-Ponty's earliest works were published as his thesis for the docteur ès lettres in 1945: The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception. These large, careful, laborious volumes, filled with recondite examples from science (physics, biology, and psychology), were an attempt to free the mind from the bonds of pure empiricism at one extreme, and idealism at the other. These two doctrines subsumed what Merleau-Ponty took to be the major fallacies of philosophy. Empiricism argued the sufficiency of practical observation and experiment, but was forced to resort to extra-empirical concepts to unify and give meaning to the results of these observations. A neurosis, for instance, can't be understood merely by adding together all its symptoms, since a neurosis is something more than the sum of its parts: it is a working whole, or Gestalt, in action. Idealism, on the other hand, taught the primacy of abstract wholes that pertain to some realm of which, by definition, we can have no experience, and the ascendancy of mind over matter. Merleau-Ponty confutes this latter belief by attention to the body's crucial role in our experience. Truth, he concludes, is based on what is real—and that is our perception of the world: perception becomes “not presumed true,” but may be “defined as access to truth.” He goes on to say, in Phenomenology of Perception, that “the world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. ‘There is a world,’ or rather: ‘There is the world’; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life.” Merleau-Ponty's efforts to account for the assertion are the positive aspect of the two volumes: he shows how human reality can best be understood in terms of behavior (action given form) which is neither a thing nor an idea, neither entirely mental nor entirely physical. Instead of rushing from one absolute incompatibility to another, torn between them, his mode of thought is dialectical, weaving among realities without absolutes. His philosophy thus took as its province what he was later to call “the constantly experienced moment.”

The two works clearly pertain both to the war experience and to the immediate postwar years. Whatever remained of “pure” thought, “pure” morality, “pure” anything, he wrote a little later, was unlearned; “we learned a kind of vulgar immoralism, which is healthy.” His task was to open men to their experience—they had been, like their country, virtually raped by history. One thinks of Yeats's “Leda” sonnet and then of Merleau-Ponty struggling to muster knowledge equal to the power of so devastating an experience. It was no longer a question of finding ways to churn up new secrets about man—which is the characteristic prejudice of late nineteenth-century philosophy and psychology. With his usual uncanny precision, André Malraux has one of the characters in his Les Noyers de l'Altenburg, a wartime novel, reject classical (and presumably Freudian) psychology exactly because man's secrets have nothing to do with man's humanity. Merleau-Ponty's thought is best understood not as a way of uncovering new truths about man but as a way of intensifying participation in human experience. One does not read his work to discover what one had not known before. Instead, one is readmitted from distraction to one's own experience, as is the case when one reads Proust (an author from whom Merleau-Ponty quotes a great deal). There is also a curious resemblance here to the Platonic doctrine of recollection. This is why, as I suggested earlier, philosophy ceases to be a privileged, professional activity to which only initiates are admitted; the language, the techniques, the biases ought to be available to all, for we are amateurs together, subjected to contingency, to “the metamorphoses of fortune,” to “facticity,” and to death.

Almost everything that Merleau-Ponty wrote after 1945 was originally cast in essay form—big books, with their forced systematic unity that draws one further into its clutches, were less open to the vagaries of human experience. His penchant for shorter forms is reminiscent of Wittgenstein's, for whom writing was less a delivery of finished thought than a series of moments fully embedded in experience. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein mirrors Merleau-Ponty's wonder at the world's presence in and around us: “Not how the world is, is the mystery, but that it is.” (Interestingly, Georg Lukács, who admits the sincerity of Merleau-Ponty's work, upbraids him for his “mystical” attitude to history and reality.)

The great themes of Merleau-Ponty's essays are language, art, psychology, and politics, and the three major volumes form part of the integral translation of his work undertaken in an extraordinary project at Northwestern University Press.¹ The earliest essays, those in Sense and Non-Sense, date from between 1945 and 1947. Those in Signs are later efforts from 1958 on, and those in The Primacy of Perception contain not only some early pieces but also the last work published during his lifetime, “Eye and Mind.” (Between Sense and Non-Sense and Signs, he wrote two volumes of political philosophy with particular attention to contemporary Marxism: Humanism and Terror and The Adventures of Dialectic. In 1964, a volume gleaned from his notes, Visible and Invisible, appeared in Paris.) His very earliest essays excepted, Merleau-Ponty's style of exposition in these volumes is novel and at first hard to fathom. For he disdains point-by-point logic, preferring instead to explore his theme laterally and obliquely, in a manner strikingly reminiscent of R. P. Blackmur's—whose interest in “gesture” Merleau-Ponty shares. This style is consistent with his belief that philosophy, or serious discourse, is “as real as the world of which it is a part,” and is “the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it.” Unlike Sartre's assertion that we are condemned to freedom, Merleau-Ponty's quieter realism illustrates that we are condemned to meaning; in all its aspects, our life is our way of giving meaning to the brute fact of existence. This analysis is a more sober version of Gerard Manley Hopkins' exuberant “the world is bursting with meaning.” Thus, in a wonderful phrase, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the world's prose, by which he does not mean that we are a tabula rasa on which the world writes, but that we express the world, its sense and non-sense, what is visible and what we experience even if it is invisible—for expression and gesture are the basic human prerogatives.

Finally, we find that the perceived world, in its turn is not a pure object of thought without fissures or lacunae; it is rather, like a universal style shared in by all perceptual beings. … Before our undivided existence the world is true; it exists. The unity, the articulation of both are intermingled. We experience it in a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.

Yet, we are condemned to meaning, and this is the other side of the coin, in much the same way that Joseph K. in The Trial is enmeshed in the Parable of the Law, forced to spin meaning after meaning for it, challenged endlessly by its seemingly inexhaustible possibilities. Merleau-Ponty offers no single meaning to existence because he is, as he has been called by one of his critics, a philosopher of ambiguity; Sartre comments a little wryly that Merleau-Ponty lived between a thesis and an antithesis, always unwilling to go to a definite synthesis. Yet, in a recent book on Roland Barthes and “la nouvelle critique,” Serge Doubrovsky laments the loss to the intellectual world of Merleau-Ponty's great synthesizing powers.

The fact of the matter is, I think, that Merleau-Ponty's language is itself the synthesis, however tenuous or difficult, for which Sartre looked. In his studies of perception, Merleau-Ponty had all but obliterated the distinction between mind and matter, as well as all the comforting and helpful antinomies with which philosophy had previously kept itself apart from the more vulgar categories of life: form and content, spirit and body. He discerned instead structures and forms that inhere in human behavior. As he said in one of his most telling phrases, perception not only involves the thinking body but also the incarnated mind. In what is his most original contribution to psychology, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that we use our body to know the world; space and time are not abstractions but almost-entities that we haunt and inhabit. The body is not an object that receives impressions which the mind then translates in its function as a subject: on the contrary, existence is the dimension of what he calls compresence.

Properly speaking, then, perception is an activity that clarifies a primordial way of being, a being that lies beneath the level of intelligible discourse. Perception, quite literally, is the way human existence comes into being. In his essay called “The Primacy of Perception,” Merleau-Ponty casts his thought as follows:

The experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent logos; that it teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary, rediscovered when it is made to appear against the background of non-human nature.

There cannot be one absolute meaning for existence, since that would presume the intellectualist distinction between transcendent meaning and human existence that Merleau-Ponty decries. His writing does not interpret in the usual sense, for then it would have to be about something; rather, it is already in the dimension of meaning (“we are condemned to meaning”), and its primary job is the articulation of that already present immanence. Not how the world is but that it is. Therefore, says Merleau-Ponty, “expressing what exists is an endless task.” There is a close connection between his manner of discourse and the critical stance of Susan Sontag, whose attitude “against interpretation” more militantly puts the French thinker's case; both write in and for the period after “the end of ideology.”

The two incipient dangers of a philosophy like this are, first, the sheer difficulty of interpreting a language that makes no concessions, and, second, a kind of laissez faire attitude to all human activity and to ethics and politics in particular. Merleau-Ponty succumbs to the first danger from time to time, but never to the second. The introduction to Signs, for example, is scarcely decipherable because it is so much like a long conversation already in progress when it begins and not really concluded by the time it is supposedly over. Terms of reference are not always clear, and allusions to people, incidents, and passages in unnamed works lurk everywhere. One hastens to add, however, that it is possible to make out the larger drift of everything Merleau-Ponty wrote because his is the prose of the world in which we now live. From Husserl he borrows the word Lebenswelt, a useful neologism coined by the German phenomenologist to designate the life-world, or life-context and life-situation, of an individual. Merleau-Ponty's answer to charges against his blatant subjectivity is always that subjectivity is itself a universal, which means that intersubjectivity, or the whole of all existing subjectivity, is the only transcendent value.

By myself I cannot be free, nor can I be a consciousness or a man; and that other whom I first saw as my rival is my rival only because he is myself. I discover myself in the other, just as I discover consciousness of life in consciousness of death, because I am from the start this mixture of life and death, solitude and communication, which is heading towards its resolution.

He clearly rejects what Herbert Marcuse has called one-dimensional man on the same grounds that made him in 1950 sharply criticize the Marxists with whose thought he had hitherto sympathized. To allow things to go as they are, whether or not commanded from above by a rationalized and monolithic super-structure, is bad faith. It means the surrender of the distinctively human activity of conscious perception, and hence the resignation of our task “to complete and conceive” the world. He reiterates time and again in his essays that the “broad lines of history,” at least as the Marxists see them, do not determine every single episode in history. “Every historical undertaking is something of an adventure since it is never guaranteed by any absolutely rational structure of things. … Our only recourse is a reading of the present which is as full and as fruitful as possible, which does not prejudice its meaning, which even recognizes chaos and non-sense where they exist, but which does not refuse to discern a direction and an idea in events where they appear.” Still, like Sartre, he freely appreciated (in the essay “Marxism and Philosophy”) what he called Marx's realistic existentialism, his dialectical mode, and the human order for which he spoke. The final ambiguity between human effort and the inner logic of history was, however, entirely necessary to Merleau-Ponty's thought. The clarity and superb insight with which he treats Montaigne and Machiavelli in Signs testify to the vital polarity between human self-examination and political realism on which his courageous posture is built.

Sartre's description of Merleau-Ponty's attitude is “smiling moroseness”; at other times, perhaps wishing to balance seriousness with humor, he speaks of Merleau-Ponty's charming “gaminerie.” Neither description, of course, does justice to Merleau-Ponty's greatest achievement as a philosopher of language (he was the first contemporary French philosopher of stature to examine language with any seriousness and profundity) and of art—and as Husserl's most imaginative student. Many months of independent research in the Husserl Archives in Louvain convinced Merleau-Ponty that Husserl, contrary to what had been thought, underwent a decisive change in mid-career. Previously a philosopher whose hope had been the formulation of a universal eidetic (or ideal essence) of mind and language, Husserl, according to Merleau-Ponty, came to realize that the clue to philosophical research was the whole man, considered in his existential situation, his Lebenswelt. From believing that a universal grammar could be discovered, Husserl passed to the belief that one's concern ought to be the “speaking subject,” since there is no such thing as a language that one does not use (the only languages we know are the ones we can use). Language (or “langage,” as it is called by the French to distinguish it from “langue,” and to suggest all forms of human articulation) is man's principal expressive mode and, as Merleau-Ponty writes in Sense and Non-Sense, it

must surround each speaking subject, like an instrument with its own inertia, its own demands, constraints, and internal logic, and must nevertheless remain open to the initiatives of the subject (as well as to the brute contributions of invasions, fashions and historical events), always capable of the displacement of meanings, the ambiguities, and the functional substitutions which give this logic its lurching gait. Perhaps the notion of gestalt, or structure, would here perform the same service it did for psychology, since both cases involve ensembles which are not the pure manifestations of a directive consciousness, which are not explicitly aware of their own principles, and which nevertheless can and should be studied by proceeding from the whole to the parts.

Structure, I think, here corresponds to Wittgenstein's notion in the Philosophical Investigations of the “forms of life” which provide language with its inner ontology and rules. Merleau-Ponty's attention to structure, which he more accurately calls infrastructure (and which has since created a minor intellectual industry in France called le structuralisme), owes its existence to an imaginative combining of Ferdinand Saussure's linguistics with Husserl's later philosophy. Saussure had argued that “signs [words] do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs.” In short, words are diacritical. Each of the national languages, and by analogy each individual's own idiom, is an indirect language that does not refer to objects but to a complex structure (“no Platonic idea”) which is the total lived and organized reality of whoever uses the language. Philosophy ought really to be a study of language—a point of view one appreciates when one reads thinkers as different in aim as Heidegger, whose work is an exploration of one German's inner reality, Wittgenstein, or the Anglo-American linguistic analysts. The study of language becomes a study in the semiology (as C. S. Peirce called it) of a given society. It has been left to such brilliant speculators as Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss to show how linguistic structures correspond to kinship systems and to the regulating structure of social exchange. Confronted with a phenomenon like magic, Merleau-Ponty writes in Signs, the investigator think his

way into the phenomenon, reading or deciphering it. And this reading always consists in grasping the mode of exchange which is constituted between men through institutions, through the connections and equivalences they establish, and through the systematic way in which they govern the use of tools, manufactured or alimentary products, magical formulas, ornaments, chants, dances, and mythical elements, as a given language governs the use of phonemes, morphemes, vocabulary, and syntax. This social fact, which is no longer a massive reality, but an efficacious system of symbols or network of symbolic values, is [in] … the depths of the individual.

Spoken language is only one of a series of concentric circles that surround man in society, for kinship systems, mythology (as Barthes and Lévi-Strauss have shown), political ideas, even household objects are varieties of human expression that correspond to each other and to language. A fully fledged culture—fully situated, that is, in existence—has what Merleau-Ponty and Sartre call a semantic thickness about it. (Here, phrases from linguistics are made to extend beyond a narrowly linguistic frame of reference in order to accentuate the notion that human society is a web of inner bonds.) Thickness suggests the density of human experience felt not only spatially but temporally, the kind of “matter” Henry James so eloquently bewailed the lack of in America when he wrote about Hawthrone. Literature and culture, Merleau-Ponty says in Sense and Non-Sense, are “defined as the progressive awareness of our multiple relationship with other people and the world, rather than as extramundane techniques.” The individual writer, he adds in The Primacy of Perception, “is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself, inventing new ways of expression, or diversifying itself according to its own meaning.” Roland Barthes' book, Le degré zéro de l'écriture, examines the degrees of difference possible for a writer in different societies, and it is an interesting fact that in his later books he turns to semiology, acknowledging his debts not only to Jakobson, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Peirce, but also to Merleau-Ponty.

Society, then, is a true labyrinth of incarnations, to use one of Merleau-Ponty's phrases from “Eye and Mind,” the richness of which it is possible to suggest in written language. A “labyrinth” because of a complexity that has no discernible end or beginning, and an “incarnation” because implicit gestural language and outward expression are inseparable, united as man himself is in an indissoluble bond between body and soul. Philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty learns it from Husserl, holds together the human sciences, for it is

the taking over of cultural operations begun before our time and pursued in many different ways, which we now “reanimate” and “reactivate” from the standpoint of our present. Philosophy lives from this power of interesting ourselves in everything that has been and is attempted in the order of knowledge and of life, and of finding a sharable sense in it, as if all things were present to us through our present. The true place of philosophy is not time, in the sense of discontinuous time, nor is it the eternal. It is rather the “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart)—that is, the present in which the whole past, everything foreign, and the whole of the thinkable future are reanimated.

These words realize and clarify Vico's in The New Science, where history and culture are shown to be made by man and therefore the first subjects of scholarly enterprise. Merleau-Ponty is linked to the great tradition of European radical humanism in which, as he says in Sense and Non-Sense, man, not Prometheus or Lucifer, is the hero.

Art is the human activity about which Merleau-Ponty speaks in terms of a unique joy. He says in Sense and Non-Sense that “the joy of art lies in showing how something takes on meaning—not by referring to already established and acquired ideas but by the temporal and spatial arrangements of elements.” Among human faculties, he attaches the greatest importance to sight, for he is convinced that the major advances in art as well as philosophy are made when man sees more of what is there. Like Ruskin's work, whose program was to show the relevance of seeing well to the spirit of his time, Merleau-Ponty's essays on the film and on Cézanne distinguish the fundamental projects animating the visual arts. In the work of a painter like Cézanne, art is “being present at the fission of Being from the inside.” In his superb essay on “Cézanne's Doubt” (which with “Eye and Mind” puts Merleau-Ponty's art criticism alongside Malraux's, Gombrich's Illusion and Reality, and Rilke's Rodin books), he treats the most philosophic of painters as if Cézanne were a phenomenologist assisting, in his work, at the very birth of meaning: “Cézanne simply expressed what they [the faces and objects as he saw them] wanted to say.” Cézanne's doubt is the essential human difficulty—and Merleau-Ponty's own—of living at and acknowledging the point where so many opposites converge, where the meaning of our reality is at once threatened and asserted: Now. “Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—a painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings.” The doubt, however, persists, and his final words on Cézanne profoundly reflect on Merleau-Ponty's own unfinished work, and that inherent yet necessary incompleteness of all human endeavor which is the basis of humanism:

Yet it was in the world that he had to realize his freedom with colors upon a canvas. It was on the approval of others that he had to wait for the proof of his worth. That is the reason he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas. That is the reason he never finished working. We never get away from life. We never see our ideas or our freedom face to face.

Note

1. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, edited by James M. Edie; Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus; Signs, translated by Richard C. McCleary (1964).