“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning” (PP, xxii): this statement reveals the existential depth Merleau-Ponty ascribes to phenomenology. We are bound to meaning insofar as we are “condemned” to have a world: an empirical, phenomenal plane of immanence in which we live through the network of relations instituted by the lived body (Leib, the lived body) as perceptual system. We never step outside the actuality of world and perception. Meaning, world, and body present themselves in correlation as a “structure”: to analyse them is to seize the very flesh of their being, rather than dissecting them into separable parts. Even when we adopt a “neutral” scientific gaze—mathematical, quantitative, discrete, digital, inhuman—our comportment toward the world remains oriented by sense: qualitative rather than quantitative, continuous rather than discrete, analogical rather than digital. Even in using science and manipulating the world, we fall back into a horizon of meaning. Our existence is tied to an order of meaningfulness: “death” is not a worldly event in the strict sense, for we cannot embody or live it without contradiction; we experience it only analogically, through the other. We always find ourselves “already born” or “still alive,” “thrown into a natural world,” and in this horizon we can interpret “birth” and “death” only at a distance, by reflection, “only as prepersonal horizons” (PP, 250). Meaning “stands” there, dynamically sedimenting within our “field of existence” (the transcendental field), a notion that is reworked in Merleau-Ponty’s later thought (VI, 171), where he sketches a new ontology of the flesh in the Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible.