“Facts and Essences”

This chapter discusses the first theme in phenomenology, facts and essences, which Merleau-Ponty presents in terms of an initial tension in phenomenology itself: phenomenology is at once a philosophy of both facts and essences and therefore seems to be an absurdity. It only appears so, he explains, within what Husserl calls the “natural attitude.” This is an attitude that, though it informs our theorizing, is in fact uncritical, unreflective, and merely habituated. Within it, we uncritically assume that, to find the essential structures explaining contingent facts, we must travel beyond those facts. This chapter introduces the natural and phenomenological attitude, the differing notion of facts and essences within them, and the phenomenological epochē—namely the disruption of the natural attitude to open up a phenomenological attitude and the phenomenological field.