Depth Loves Masks: Being as a Play of Images

Merleau-Ponty staunchly displays his rejection of a direct ontology and this is primarily a way of indicating his worries about a tendency toward occultism that he thinks is present in Heidegger and in some of his followers. “If we call philosophy the search for Being or for the Ineinander, is not philosophy quickly brought to silence—that very silence which from time to time breaks into Heidegger’s essays? But does this not stem from Heidegger’s search for a direct expression of what is fundamental at the very moment he is showing us its impossibility? Does it not stem from his refusal of all the mirrors of Being?”