In the Fifth Lecture: Man Seen from the Outside of Merleau-Ponty’s The World of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explores the assimilation between the understanding of ourselves and the understanding of others. He starts off his fifth lecture with Descartes and how he believes that we best understand ourselves through our own self-consciousness which is connected to our own physical body, which is located in physical space. Although Merleau-Ponty does agree with this, he fully cannot support it as a standalone statement. Merleau-Ponty’s reasoning for this then follows with our experiences of others. Descartes’ position on his statement estranges us from others due to the implied statement that says we know others only indirectly through their
