Merleau-Ponty's own body and tacit cogito

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with its concern not to place the subject or the world as precedence for understanding the relationship between being and the lived world breaks with the main philosophical currents of modernity namely intellectualism and empiricism. To overcome this Merleau-Ponty uses the notion of his own body and approaches perception from the point of view of the perceiver. As a result the being in the world situated in its surrounding world is in a constant relationship with it without ever distinguishing itself. The cogito therefore elevated to absolute status by Descartes is once again mundane in this phenomenological philosophy. Thought no longer has the power to swallow everything apart from the world. To be in the world in short is to be situated in an experiential effectiveness in which subject and world intertwine in a mutuality that forms the only possible experience. Finally this article will deal with this overcoming of phenomenology in the face of the egoic absolutism left by Descartes' intellectualism.