A Great deal of contemporary French philosophy is phenomenology. Phenomenology, roughly speaking, rejects the positivistic view of objective reality, and puts forward an ‘intentional’ reality, brought about tosome extent by our own purposes, individual and collective. Merleau-Ponty starts from the phenomenological position, and assigns to objective thinkingits origin and place within phenomenological thinking. My references will be almost exclusively to the Phenomenology of Perception, which is really a phenomenology of consciousness, starting from the problem of perception. Perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, is one way of ‘being conscious’, which is not essentially different from any other way of being conscious.