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self-enclosed but had “windows” through which it could make empathetic contact withother such monadic egos. Eventually -- but only eventually and as a kind of filling-in ofthe blanks -- this “universal self-knowledge -- first of all monadic, and then intermonadic”was supposed to get around to dealing with the concrete, existential “problems ofaccidental factualness, of death, of fate, of the possibility of a ‘genuine’ human life,” andthe “problem of the ‘meaning’ of history.” 63 Such was the complex manner -- workingto get at our experience of the world from, as it were, the top down and the inside out --in which Husserl sought to subvert or deconstruct the metaphysics of modernity. AlthoughMerleau-Ponty always tried to present Husserl in the best possible light, he was not preparedto grant any validity to this typically modernist way of proceeding (this “methodicidealism,” as Ricoeur has called it), since the most important thing for him was to effecta decisive overcoming of that most basic conceptual opposition of the metaphysics ofmodernity, the opposition between “inside” and “outside.” “Inside and outside are inseparable,”he stated categorically and without hesitation. “The world is wholly inside and I amwholly outside myself.” (PP, 407) Such, for Merleau-Ponty, was the true meaning ofphenomenology’s great discovery: intentionality.In the Preface to his major work, Phenomenology of Perception, in which he soughtto respond to the question (put to him by his thesis supervisor, Émile Bréhier) “What isPhenomenology?” and in the course of which he presented his own existential reading ofsome of the major themes in Husserl’s phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty stated what hehimself saw to be the most important lesson to be learned from putting into play thephenomenological reduction. “The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us,”he said, “is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” (PP, xiv) In this much remarkeduponphrase, Merleau-Ponty was not calling into question the need for the reduction, i.e.,for a conscientiously transcendental approach to the question as to the meaning of thebeing of the world. He was not advocating any form of “realist” phenomenology but was,instead, objecting to the way in which Husserl had presented the reduction (as describedin the preceding paragraph). While, for Merleau-Ponty, the reduction was indispensablefor overcoming the metaphysics of modernity and leading us back to our lived experienceof the world, it does not, and cannot, afford us access to a “pure,” monadic ego whichwould be the absolute source of all that is, and can be for us, an absolute consciousnesswhich would be coextensive with being itself.And in rejecting Husserl’s “idealist” presentation of the reduction, Merleau-Ponty wasalso thereby ruling out the possibility of our ever achieving the kind of apodictically certainscience of being that Husserl had dreamed of. Like Heidegger, 64 Merleau-Ponty believedthat the ultimate discovery of the reflecting subject is that of his or her own “thrownness”into the world, or, as Merleau-Ponty put it, “the unmotivated upsurge of the world.” 65(PP, xiv) Accordingly, what a genuinely transcendental or “radical” reflection amounts to,he said, is “a consciousness of its own dependence on an unreflective life which is itsinitial situation, unchanging, given once and for all.” (PP, xiv)The greater part of the Phenomenology of Perception was devoted to an explorationof this unreflective or prereflective life which underlies and supports that of the reflectingsubject, i.e., perception. In this work, which was intended as a kind of “inventory of the63See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, sec. 64, 156. It is obvious that Husserl, in a kind of afterthought,as it were, is here trying to find a place in his own transcendental-idealist conceptual frameworkfor Heidegger’s existential concerns.64As Ricoeur observes, the “horizon” of the Phenomenology of Perception is “nothing other thanHeideggerian care and being-in-the-world.” IA, 11.65This is what elsewhere Merleau-Ponty refers to as contingency, which was for him the most basicof all phenomenological facts.21