Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself.

This atomist-causal conception was being perpetuated in certain psychological currents of the time particularly in behaviourism. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930. " Among the many working notes found on his desk at the time of his death and publiMaurice Merleau-Pontyd with the half-complete manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible several make evident that Merleau-Ponty himself recognized a deep affinity between his notion of a primordial "flesh" and a radically transformed understanding of "nature.

He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences and especially with descriptive psychology. Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge and his insight that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other.