Merleau-Ponty and Berkeley

Merleau-Ponty's description of lived experience is an explicit challenge to Kant, insofar as it reveals an a posteriori structuring of that experience, e. g. synaesthesia is a pre-intellectual unification of a sensory manifold. But, his presentation has a more immediate, albeit implicit, target. First, he establishes that Sensation is corporeal, citing studies that demonstrate that an ingredient in basic sensory experience is the body's attunement to specific sense content. Second, he shows how the transition from Sensation to Perception is accomplished by locating the sensible object at a distance from the subject. He likens this process to binocular focusing, which discovers depth perception terminating in a unitary object. Though Merleau-Ponty does not mention him in this context, this account of the actuality of visual depth is a clear reference to Berkeley, for whom the thesis of the derivative and abstract nature of depth perception is essential to his doctrine that experience is fundamentally incorporeal. So, the ultimate historical significance of Merleau-Ponty's Corporealism is not so much with respect to Kant or Sartre, but as an innovation within the Phenomenalist-Phenomenological tradition as a whole.