In developing an existential phenomenology Merleau-Ponty suggests that we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world and by practicing a “direct description” of this world: “All the efforts [of phenomenology] are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world . . . it also offers an account of space, time and the world as we “live” them. It tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking into account of its psychological origin and the causal explanations which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist may be able to provide” (1962, p. vii). For Merleau-Ponty the original human relation to the world is a relation of perception. But this perception takes place at a primal, corporeal, and preconscious level. The body-subject is already interlaced with the flesh of the world before having reflective knowledge of it. Or, to say it differently, our knowledge of the world—of others and things—is corporeal, rather than intellectual. We know the world bodily and through our embodied actions. And in some sense this is a preknowing knowing: we know our world first of all through our embodied being rather than immediately in a disembodied intellectual manner. That is why Merleau-Ponty can say that we do not really know what we see. Most of the time, we act and do things apparently unthinkingly—it is as if the body already knows what to do and how to do it. And that is indeed the case. Merleau-Ponty makes extensive use of the pathic power of poetic language in his writing. It is no accident that, in his introductory discussion of phenomenology (in the Preface to The Phenomenology of Perception), he concludes by comparing the sensitivity and sensibility of phenomenological inquiry to the artistic process: “Phenomenology is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry or Cézanne— through the same kind of attention and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state. As such, phenomenology merges with the effort of modern thought (2012, p. lxxxv)”.