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The esthesiology of the senses of the perceptual body will lead Merleau-Ponty to thenotion of “corporeal schema,” thereby meaning that the body is the “very actuality of thephenomenon of expression (Ausdruck). In the body, the visual experience and the hearingexperience, for instance, are mutually impregnating, and their expressive value founds theante-predicative unity of the perceived world and, thereby, the verbal expression (Darstellung)and the intellectual significance (Bedeutung).” 28 My body is, at least in relationto the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension.” Hence the secret ofthis “comprehending” will be the very relation of co-belonging, by which space prolongsitself and invades the “inside of the body,” 29 and that inside of the body, proceeding towardsits periphery, becomes entirely body and thus prolongs itself and invades space.3.It would be interesting to confront the idea of an inside of the body with the analogousconcept of an extension or inner space of the body 30 as formulated by Maine de Biran(1766-1824), a philosopher whom Merleau-Ponty analyzes in lectures he gave in 1947-48at the École Normale Supérieure, and which address the problem of the union of body andsoul. The question of an “inner space of the body,” related to the theme of immediate apperception,is underlined by Merleau-Ponty as a decisive moment in that distinctive philosophicalendeavor undertaken by Maine de Biran. In so far as de Biran’s work allows usto thematize a “space of the body preceding objective space, as well as a presence of theexternal at the very heart of self-awareness” 31 that thus simultaneously discovers itself asconsciousness of the body, this philosophical enterprise was regarded by Merleau-Pontyas a radical departure. 32 It should actually be regarded as a real “pre-empting of phenomenology.”33 This cannot but arouse the interest of those who seek to mark the relation betweenthe interior and the external as representing, and being at, the core of the problematicof space.At this point, Merleau-Ponty is analyzing the fact that de Biran, in reflections he developedin his later life, did not start out from a position that says all there is to say aboutthe human being in its self-awareness. Rather, that de Biran began with the reality of abeing “who is becoming aware of his or her existence and therefore struggles against a precedingopaqueness, i.e., a being who is trying to ‘become a self.’” 34 In fact, de Biran presentedthe identity of the idea -- with itself as a simple boundary, or the reflective unity ofexperience as familiar -- with the temporal unravelling of that experience. 35For Maine de Biran, the necessary background to this question is the search for thebeginning or starting-point of thinking. This search should establish the grounds for a“subjective ideology that concentrates upon the very core of the thinking subject and penetratesits relations with itself in a more intimate way.” 36 At the center of this debate liesthe notion of “cause,” whose original sense de Biran seeks to unveil in the individuality28Ibid., 271.29Ibid., 272.30Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson (Paris:Vrin, 1968), 59.31Ibid., 65.32Ibid., 49.33Ibid., 56.34Ibid., 54.35Ibid., 57.36Pierre Montebello, La décomposition de la pensée. Dualité et empirisme chez Maine de Biran(Grenoble: Millon, 1994), 25. Cf. Maine de Biran, La décomposition de la pensée (Paris: Vrin, 1988) III, 26.118