Abstract

This book is a study of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with especial reference to the problem of the possibility of a philosophical articulation of the pre-linguistic world of perception. The return to beginnings of which Sallis speaks is the return to the "wild being" of the world of perception at a deeper and more original level than thought and language. Sallis appears skeptical of a philosophy rooted in a world prior to thought and language. "That return to beginnings in which beginning is pre-understood as identical with the perceptual dimension proves to be such that, when brought to its fulfillment, as in The Visible and the Invisible, it abolishes its own standpoint".