phenomenology

Understanding phenomenology
David R Cerbone (Acumen 2006)
Ch 4 on Merleau-Ponty
M-P's phenomenology aims to describe our embodied perceptual experience of the world, our sense of subjectivity and emerging object - before we divide our experience into subject and object.
Slogan: "I am open to the world" - to direct experience without analysing, naming, explaining, judging
This openness is however intentional in that we choose to engage with particular people, objects, situations.  What we engage with is always within a context or ground and emotional response is not separate from it; the experience is imbued with that emotion.  You can't split the physiological and psychological.
It's open-endedness means that 'nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see'.

Gay Watson in 'A philosophy of emptiness' ( Reaktion Books 2014) says that M-P thought we tended to take a representational view of bodily experience, and that he wanted us to question this and really see what was going on through a practice of attentiveness.  He wrote: 'True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world.'
The idea of presence is key; mind/body and subject/world are abstractions from this - 'reinstating the embodied subject as one that is never  distinct and separated, but always intentionally related to the world'.  A person has a dynamic relation with the world, is connected.  Being embodied one is both visible and seeing.