Rodger Broome’s Reviews > Merleau-Ponty's Ontology > Status Update

“How are thought AND thing, perceptual object AND idea, world AND meaning to be brought together into a universe that encompasses them both without contradiction, but holds them far enough apart to allow for the referentiality upon which the possibility of truth and falsity depend? Our century has given its answer: it has named the place of the ‘AND’ as language…

It is the phenomena of shame, punishment, rejection, and the like which motivate the erosion of syncretic sociability or prepersonal communality and enforce the correlative awareness of forlornness, isolation, and alienation which are the birthpains of selfhood.