Why did Merleau-Ponty say that human perception is perspectival and incomplete?

In the context of Continental philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that human perception is inherently perspectival and incomplete because it is fundamentally grounded in our bodily behavior and situated existence.

Unlike theories that treat perception as a purely intellectual or logical deduction, Merleau-Ponty maintained that we perceive the world as embodied subjects. Because we occupy a specific point in space and time, our access to objects is always partial; we can only ever see an object from a particular angle or orientation at any given moment. This "perspectival" nature means that our experience of the world is not a totalizing, objective view from nowhere, but a series of profiles that never fully exhaust the object's reality.

By grounding knowledge in perception rather than abstract reason, he emphasized that the organism must be considered as a whole. Our engagement with the environment is an ongoing, lived process where the "incompleteness" of our view is not a failure of cognition, but a necessary condition of being a physical being within the world.1