Merleau-Ponty began his phenomenology of perception from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts

Evidence

One of the first to travel to Louvain to see the archive was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who already knew Husserl’s earlier work well, and had read about the unpublished manuscripts in an article in the Revue internationale de philosophie. In March 1939, he wrote to arrange a visit to Father Van Breda so as to pursue his special interest in the phenomenology of perception. Van Breda welcomed him, and Merleau-Ponty spent a blissful first week of April in Louvain, absorbed in the unedited and unpublished sections which Husserl had intended to add to Ideas and to The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 425

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s orientation goal: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception grew out of these Louvain archive materials. — connects to: Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts held his most important work — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 434; Husserl’s Ideas II circulated in manuscript before its 1952 publication. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 399
• QUESTION: Which specific unpublished Husserl passages shaped Merleau-Ponty’s body-centered phenomenology? Worth following.
• SEED: Angle: how a physical archive visit to uncirculated manuscripts — not just published texts — birthed one of phenomenology’s central works.