The volume includes two texts by Merleau-Ponty from late 1951, the original purpose of which was to introduce him to the admissions committee as a candidate for the prestigious Collège de France. The texts contain an elaborate summary of Merleau-Ponty's first publications (The Structure of Behavior, Phenomenology of Perception) as well as a description of the projects he was working on (The Prose of the World) and planning (The Visible and the Invisible), but above all an overview of the problems and themes he wanted to address in his teaching at the Collège. Thus, unlike the vast majority of other material published after Merleau-Ponty's death, the texts for the candidature present the philosopher's thought project as a unified edifice in which many sub-topics, not at first sight entirely related, are linked. Central to all the intended explorations is thus the question of how the bodily-perceptual life, whose specific form Merleau-Ponty described in his early books, is prolonged and transformed with the advent of cultural tools and speech, leading to an "experience of truth," that is, to a transcendence of our partial situation in knowledge. If the phenomenological analysis of perception has shown that perception is not merely a rudimentary form of rational knowledge, then our very idea of reason cannot remain unchanged, since an analysis of the concrete procedures by which rationality grasps reality and achieves its results has yet to be made. The materials that emerged during the following ten years of Merleau-Ponty's tenure at the Collège de France show that he devoted the rest of his life to the fulfillment and refinement of a program formulated in just this way.
Czech edition