The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.

This atomist-causal conception was being perpetuated in certain psychological currents of the time particularly in behaviourism. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930. " Among the many working notes found on his desk at the time of his death and publiMaurice Merleau-Pontyd with the half-complete manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible several make evident that Merleau-Ponty himself recognized a deep affinity between his notion of a primordial "flesh" and a radically transformed understanding of "nature.

He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences and especially with descriptive psychology. Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge and his insight that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other.