Liminality and the Problem of Being-in-the-world: Reflections on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty

Despite their common roots in the phenomenological tradition, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty differed markedly in the way they formulated the problem of being-in-the-world. Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" emphasised the dualistic, oppositional, and even antagonistic relationship between human consciousness and the world inhabited by consciousness, while Merleau-Ponty, in texts such as "Phenomenology of Perception" and "The Visible and the Invisible", conceptualised a kind of originary communion between consciousness and world that stressed their imbrication rather than their separateness. The present essay is an attempt to develop a theoretical framework through which to interpret this basic difference between the two thinkers.