He asserts that phenomenology contains a series of apparent contradictions, which include the fact that it attempts to create a philosophy that would be a rigorous science while also offering an account of space, time and the world as people experience them.

Merleau-Ponty's account of the body helps him undermine what had been a long-standing conception of consciousness, which hinges on the distinction between the for-itself (subject) and in-itself (object), which plays a central role in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose Being and Nothingness was released in 1943.

[8] Rhiannon Goldthorpe called the book Merleau-Ponty's major work, noting that its discussion of subjects such as the relationship of the body to spatial experience, and sexuality, went beyond "the nominal range of his title.

He rejected the idea that Merleau-Ponty's "animistic" language was the result of poetic license, arguing that he "writes of the perceived things as entities, of sensible qualities as powers, and of the sensible itself as a field of animate presences, in order to acknowledge and underscore their active, dynamic contribution to perceptual experience.

"[10] American vice president Al Gore, in a 1998 interview with the critic Louis Menand in The New Yorker, mentioned Phenomenology of Perception as an inspiration.

[11] The philosopher Stephen Priest commented that, following the book's publication, Merleau-Ponty decided that in it he had taken "subject-object dualism as phenomenologically primitive" and "made use of a comparatively superficial psychologistic vocabulary" that he wished to replace.

According to Madison, Merleau-Ponty sought to respond in his later work to the charge that by grounding all intellectual and cultural acquisitions in the prereflective and prepersonal life of the body, he was promoting reductionism and anti-intellectualism and undermining the ideals of reason and truth.