Let's admit it: this is the hard bit. I can't discuss phobias and anxiety without mentioning Heidegger. But then I have trouble reading Heidegger. When I open Sein und Zeit (I don't do it too often but I have had to before writing this page), Boileau's verses inevitably ring in my ear : 
 

The lines go with a smile full of self-satisfaction. Any French student has heard them many times. And, indeed, this association of Heidegger with these lines and this smile (an association that is purely mechanical, like the way Pavlov's dogs salivate when the bell rings) comes from the time when I was an undergraduate.

Our curriculum was dominated by two courses, each taught by a youngish assistant professor. On Tuesdays, in the morning, we had the Heideggerio-Derridean. I will call him Dr. A. The course, I remember, was about sleep: the sleeping Dasein. Of course, it was half in German. Not the kind of German you could use in a restaurant to order your meal. It was much easier. There were just single words based on puns. The problem was not with the words but the sentences they were trapped in. These sentences were not meaningless. If I took one, and pondered long enough, I could reconstruct a meaning (though I was never quite sure it was the meaning intended). The real problem was that what was said had little to do with sleep. Or at least I could not reconnect this universe, where German words hung like ghosts, to sleep as I slept it. It seemed Heidegger, or Dr. A., slept in a far more grandiose way than I did.

Dr. A had a difficult task. His course was followed in the afternoon by that of Dr. B, who was teaching ethics. He knew we came out of Dr A's class and invariably greeted us with a self-satisfied smile. He did use Boileau's verses two or three times. But most often he did not have to. We could hear them in his smile. Then he went on discussing all the presuppositions and the consequences and the refutations of one single thought experiment that he had told us in September. It was as short as a joke. It was not particularly funny. It was very different from the actual situations we might be involved with, though, after all, a similar situation might arise. And, as I said, he had told us the story in September and was still discussing it in May. In fact, you could sleep for a while, and be quite sure that the discussion would not have moved too far.

In any case, Dr A and Dr B both contributed to vaccinating me against Heidegger and analytic ethics. The stuff was inoculated in small quantities so I could not be infected, but they were enough for me to build strong defenses. I have never been able to overcome these defenses.

Probably I have never wanted to. I can state the matter a bit differently. As a student, my main subject was mathematics. I had registered in philosophy out of some kind of curiosity. I liked mathematics but I was somehow dissatisfied. In fact, I liked mathematics and was dissatisfied for the same reason. Mathematics was fun, like a game, though I could see it was more than a game. But I felt it was abstract. It had nothing to do with life (“life” as in the expression “C'est la vie”: “That's life”). And I didn't want to spend my life outside life: I was a teenager. So what I was looking for in philosophy was a way to relate to “life.”

In any case, when I first read Merleau-Ponty, I enthusiastically embraced his motto, according to which the task of philosophy is “to bring experience to expression”: to describe life in such a way as to give room to, and possibly answer, the questions that life raises. It is not to say that philosophy is literature. But, from this point of view, there seemed to be more philosophy in Proust or Borges or Ponge or Ph. K. Dick than there was in Heidegger and analytic ethics.

Of course, Merleau-Ponty had read, and relied on, Husserl, and Heidegger, and Sartre. However, his philosophical domain is somehow underneath that of Husserl, Heidegger, or Sartre. The aim is to describe our experience, starting from our everyday vocabulary, with the most common words, a style that a novelist could use, and from there see questions arising, or find out to what extent the questions that philosophers raise do arise: to what extent can we make the jump from our actual experience to the transcendental ego, or to the world as such, or the opposition between Being and Nothing? Maybe we cannot, and these concepts are then abstractions drawn from, but also hiding, the flesh of the world.