if I tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodied forth the framework of the world or illumined it through and through, I should once more prove unfaithful to my experience of the world, and should be looking for what makes that experience possible instead of looking for what it is. The self-evidence of perception is not adequate thought or apodeictic self-evidence. The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. 'There is a world,' or rather: 'There is the world'; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life. This facticity of the world is...what causes the world to be the world; just as the facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in itself, but rather what assures me of my existence...It is a question of recognizing consciousness itself as a project of the world, meant for a world which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed -- and the world as this pre-objective individual whose imperious unity decrees what knowledge shall take as its goal...Our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly enunciated within us, is not a thing which can be any further clarified by analysis; philosophy can only place it once more before our eyes and present it for our ratification.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Colin Smith), pg. xvii-xviii.