How did Maurice Merleau-Ponty build on Husserl’s idea of the life-world?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty built upon Edmund Husserl’s later phenomenology of the life-world by shifting the focus toward the lived body. While Husserl introduced the life-world as the realm of immediate, everyday experience, Merleau-Ponty anchored these perceptions in the phenomenology of the "lived body"—the body as both an entity that experiences and is experienced.1

In this framework, the perceiving subject is incarnated, serving as the essential mediating link between the individual and the phenomenal world. By prioritizing this bodily presence, Merleau-Ponty sought to overcome the rigid dichotomy between idealism and realism, proposing instead that consciousness and the world are reciprocally related. Consequently, he transformed phenomenology into a method for demonstrating the fundamental involvement of human existence in the world, beginning with the primacy of everyday perception.1