Merleau-Ponty on Truth and Experience in Metaphysics

I often argue with people about the importance of reading through the correlationist tendencies in Merleau-Ponty's work in order to grasp the more radical conclusions of his philosophy of immanence and embodied experience. It is true that Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we can only know the world as it is 'for-us', but it is equally true and important that the world and our knowing it are not two, ontologically speaking, but rather deeply intertwinned realities ultimately generated from the same ontological matrix, or Flesh of reality. That is, we may know the world in human terms, but we do so intimately because our embodied perceptions (and sensations) are not ontologically 'other than' that which we seek to know. We are made of the same stuff.

From Merleau-Ponty’s Sense and Non-Sense:

“The germ of universality or the “natural light” without which there could be no knowledge is to be found ahead of us, in the thing where our perception places us, in the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us by means of a movement not all of whose sources are known to us. Metaphysics begins from the moment when, ceasing to live in the evidence of the object – whether it is the sensory object or the object of science – we apperceive the radical subjectivity of all our experience as inseparable from its truth value. It means two things to say that our experience is our own: both that it is not the measure of all imaginable being in itself and that it is nonetheless co-extensive with all beings of which we can form a notion. This double sense of the cogito is the basic fact of metaphysics: I am sure that there is being – on the condition that I do not seek another sort of being than being-for-me. When I am aware of sensing, I am not, on the one hand, conscious of my state and, on the other, of a certain sensuous quality such as red or blue – but red or blue are nothing other than my different ways of running my eyes over what is offered to me and of responding to its solicitation… Metaphysics is the deliberate intention to describe this paradox of consciousness and truth, exchange and communication, in which science lives and which it encounters in the guise of vanquished difficulties or failures to be made good but which it does not thematize. From the moment I recognize that my experience, precisely insofar as it is my own, makes me accessible to what is not myself, that I am sensitive to the world and to others, all the beings which objective thoughts placed at a distance draw singularly nearer to me . . . Metaphysical consciousness has no other objects than those of experience: this world, other people, human history, truth, culture. But instead of taking them as all settled, as consequences with no premises, as if they were self evident, it rediscovers their fundamental strangeness to me and the miracle of their appearing.” 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 93-94.