1. Albert Camus,The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York, 1955), p. 6.
2. Merleau-Ponty,Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith (London, 1962), p. 95. References to the French edition (Paris, 1945) will appear in the text using the abbreviation ‘PP-F’.
3. Although some of his critics are disposed to deny that Merleau-Ponty concerns himself with critical inquiry into “possibility conditions” and interpret him as confining himself exclusively to the business of “pure description,” in fact, much of Merleau-Ponty's discourse is devoted to the task of showing how it is possible (among other things) for consciousness to be incarnate. The standpoint being developed here is that embodiment, or union of soul and body in one reality, isde jureimpossible and inconceivable outside of such a framework as Merleau-Ponty's ontology. Although one typically finds ade factounion of the psychical and the physical asserted or presupposed within philosophical contexts whose theoretical structure, if adhered to with rigorous consistency, should rule out such a union in principle. As we intend to show, Sartre provides an instance of this kind of mistake. Merleau-Ponty's ontology, in contrast to Sartre's, will here be regarded as setting forth the conditions under which the incarnation of consciousness is possible. However, it must be borne in mind that these possibility conditions are not to be understood merely as transcendental presuppositions; they are also descriptions of that reality in which embodiment is a fact.
4. “It seems to me that Sartre's analysis of the body, while it is undoubtedly a subtle and penetrating study, is infected with a bias deriving from his implicit acceptance of the Cartesian dualism, an acceptance moreover which does not seem to be noticed by him.” Richard M. Zaner,The Problem of Embodiment(Netherlands, 1964), p. 111.
5. Sartre,Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes (New York, 1956), Introduction, l–lxvii.