As we know much continental philosophy is a reactions against the intellectual heritage of classical modern science and philosophy, Galilean-Cartesian physics, and Cartesian mind-body dualisms. This heritage, passing through Newton and Laplace, Comte and 19th-century positivism generally, had a reach long and powerful enough to be a viable option even in the 20th-century contexts. Merleau Ponty's earlier phenomenology---ie., The Phenomenology of Perception---stressed the lived-body (le corps propre) as against the objective body studied in the sciences, and a body-consciousness as opposed to a non-corporeal Cartesian cogito.

Merleau-Ponty's later work, represented principally in The Visible and the Invisible, suggests that the lived-body has become what he calls "intercorporeity". According to Merleau-Ponty our inherence in the world means that the world is capable of encroaching upon and altering us, just as we are capable of altering it. Such an ontology rejects any absolute antinomy between self and world, as well as any notion of subjectivity that prioritizes a rational, autonomous individual, who is capable of imposing their choice upon a situation that is entirely external to them.

In the last phase of his thinking he therefore strives ever more resolutely to free himself from the received view of intentionality as subjectivity standing over against and external to objects radically heterogeneous with it, and as occupying a specious present sharply distinct from past and future moments in a linear temporality. Body and world, like past and present, he now insists, are "interwoven" in such a way that seemingly neat conceptual distinctions between them are bound to distort and misrepresent the phenomena as we actually live and understand them in preconceptual, prereflective, prearticulate ways.

Now, there is flesh because we are corporeal, obvious enough when we take 'flesh' in its literal meaning. It is the body's presence, then, that places us in the world fundamentally as an event of openness