We can neither escape personal responsibility by imagining that our dependence upon others determines how we are to act, nor escape this dependence upon others by imagining that our freedom enables us to shape our future inalienably. Instead, and this, for Merleau-Ponty, is the ‘modern form of humanism’, we have to accept that there is an inescapable ‘ambiguity’ in human life, whereby we have to accept responsibility for our actions even though the significance of everything we try to do is dependent upon the meaning others give to it. It is here that Merleau-Ponty’s idiom is recognisably ‘existentialist’, as he acknowledges the ‘anxiety’ inherent in this situation and calls for ‘courage’ in accepting both the inescapability of our responsibility and the impossibility of guaranteeing what our responsibilities will turn out to be.
Thomas Baldwin, from the introduction to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The World of Perception
