We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.

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.