Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy suggests the search for the self and consciousness need not be focused on the space within our skulls. Instead, we should turn our attention to the lived body.

There is an element of truth, Merleau-Ponty thinks, in this Cartesian return to the self. It is clearly true, for instance, that we can only have experience of objects if we are ourselves conscious subjects of experience, and if we distinguish between ourselves as subjects and an objective world that transcends our subjective experience of it.