The 20th-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty studied human perception his entire career. He stressed the absolutely fundamental, primary nature of our perception – being there and situating us in the world before any analysis, judgment, explanation or observation. Here is what he says in the “Preface” of his highly influential work Phenomenology of Perception (originally published in 1945 and, given the historical context of the horrors of World War II, it offers a sobering but also encouraging reminder that we can know ourselves only through our being in the world):
“The world is there prior to every analysis that I could give of it, and it would be artificial to derive it from a series of syntheses that would first link sensations and then perspectival appearances of the object together, whereas both of these are in fact products of the analysis and must not have existed prior to it… The real is a tightly woven fabric; it does not wait for our judgments in order to incorporate the most surprising of phenomena, nor to reject the most convincing of our imaginings. Perception is not a science of the world, nor even an act or a deliberate taking of a stand; it is the background against which all acts stand out and is thus presupposed by them. The world is not an object whose law of constitution I have in my possession; it is the natural milieu and the field of all my thoughts and of all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not merely “dwell” in the “inner man”; or rather, there is no “inner man,” man is in and toward the world, and it is in the world that he knows himself. When I return to myself from the dogmatism of common sense or of science, I do not find a source of intrinsic truth, but rather a subject destined to the world.“
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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