Towards Merleau-Ponty's vision of man and world

The aim of the paper is to point out some of the characteristics of Merleau -Ponty's phenomenology as embodied in his vision of man and world and devel oped in his Phenomenology of Perception. The author focuses especially on M erleau-Ponty's criticism of several essential theses of J.-P. Sartre's Bein g and Nothingness. Merleau-Ponty tries to revitalize the bonds between thos e spheres of being, which in Sartre's vision are antithetical, and thus ful ly alienated. It should be remembered, however, that the essential problems of Phenomenology of Perception have their origins in his previous work, na mely in The Structure of Behaviour (1942), in which they have been formulat ed independently of Sartre's vision.