Husserl’s Greatest Discovery According to Merleau-Ponty: The Heraclitean Flow, Between Reason and Unreason

Beginning with his first writings, Merleau-Ponty initiates a process of reflection on the mode of being of sense in general. This process is inseparable from reflection on the mode of being of every reality, and it will be absolutely foundational for the rest of his work. In a first step I will thus consider the specific reasons why, according to Merleau-Ponty, sense is and necessarily must be open and volatile. To establish this thesis Merleau-Ponty builds on Husserl’s highly problematic notion of the sensible flow of adumbrations, providing a deeper account of it through the Saussurian theory of diacritical systems, and by drawing on the model of childhood syncretism.