How did Maurice Merleau-Ponty explain the primacy of perception?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty explained the "primacy of perception" by rejecting the traditional philosophical tendency to prioritize theoretical or scientific knowledge over the lived experience of the world. He argued that perception is the fundamental source of knowledge and must be studied prior to conventional sciences.1

Key aspects of his explanation include:

• The Lived Body: Merleau-Ponty anchored perception in the "lived body"—the body as both an experiencing subject and an object in the world. He posited that the perceiving subject is incarnated, serving as the mediating link between the individual and the phenomenal world.2
• Rejection of Dualism: He rejected the rigid mind-body dualism found in Cartesian philosophy, viewing it as inadequate for understanding human experience. Instead, he proposed that consciousness and the world are reciprocally related.32
• Perspectival Nature: Because human experience requires a body positioned in space, it is necessarily perspectival and incomplete. He argued that while we perceive objects as multidimensional, our limited perspective ensures that part of the object always exceeds our cognitive grasp.3
• Against Bracketing: Unlike Edmund Husserl, who used the epoché (or "bracketing") to suspend beliefs about the world, Merleau-Ponty argued that our experience of the world is primary and cannot be set aside.32