In his influential work Phenomenology of Perception (originally published in 1945), the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that to see a house as it itself is would mean to see it from everywhere. What does he mean? After all, to see always means to see from somewhere.
Precisely so. We are finite beings and so we cannot see a house from all possible perspectives and at all possible moments in time, all at once. If we notice and acknowledge this fact about our very way of being, then even in our most radical, philosophical, scientific, and objective reflection, we will be conscious of “its own dependence on an unreflected life that is its initial, constant, and final situation.”
Indeed, because philosophy (and any other scientific, analytic, objective knowledge) fundamentally relies on its inherence in the unreflected lived experiences of an empirical, actually living subject “who knows all things from a particular perspective”, the task of making explicit, precise, and clear can never be absolute and complete.
“Reflection can never make it the case that I cease… to see the sun “rise” and “set”, or that I cease to think with the cultural instruments that were provided by my upbringing, my previous efforts, and my history. Thus, I never actually bring together or simultaneously awaken all of the originary thoughts that contribute to my perception or to my present conviction.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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