SOURCE: Said, Edward W. “Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” Kenyon Review 29, no. 1 (January 1967): 54-68.

In the following essay, Said explores Merleau-Ponty's place in post-1930s French philosophy.

According to Emile Brehier, the distinguished philosopher and historian of philosophy, the major task faced by French thinkers of the early twentieth century was to re-situate man in what he aptly describes as “the circuit of reality.” The theories of which Bergson and Durkheim, for example, were heirs had isolated man in a limbo, in order that “reality,” or whatever was left when man was lifted aside, could be studied. Mechanism, determinism, sociologism: a variety of sometimes simple and sometimes ingenious keys kept unlocking doors that led further away from what philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre were later to call “lived”—as opposed to general, universal, abstract or theoretical—“life.” The discrediting of these “isms,” which...