Following the publication of the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty returns to the question of things again but this time outside of the context of a phenomenology of perception per se. In the 1948 conference ‘L’homme et l’objet’ and in the Causeries, also from 1948, responding to Sartre's 1947 article ‘Man and Things’, Merleau-Ponty takes up some of Sartre's own references (Ponge, Bachelard, surrealism) in order to challenge Sartre's ontology of the object. We said earlier that Merleau-Ponty is starting to sketch a movement out of phenomenology toward an ontology that can account for the wildness of things. What interests me particularly in the texts from this period is the role that anthropomorphism plays in this move. We know that in The Visible and the Invisible, speaking of the flesh of the visible, Merleau-Ponty is quick to point out that he in no way means to ‘do anthro-pology’ or to ‘describe a world covered over with all our own projections, leaving aside what it can be under the human mask’ (VI, 136). Yet it would be difficult to deny that Merleau-Ponty often speaks in ways that sound anthropomorphic, and such a tendency is especially marked in the texts from 1948. For example, in the Causeries, he speaks of things as ‘clothed [revêtues] in human characteristics’ (WP, 49), as ‘a combination [mélange] of mind and body’ (WP, 43), and as ‘symboli[sing] for us a particular way of behaving [conduite]’ (WP, 48, trans. mod.). But even in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty speaks again of the necessity for my gaze to ‘clothe [things] with its own flesh’ (VI, 131). How is this not supposed to lead us to believe that we are only doing anthropology and addressing things only insofar as they are ‘covered over with all our own projections’?

Rather than attempting to defend Merleau-Ponty against the charge of anthropomorphism, I want to highlight the role it plays in his thinking.