But Merleau-Ponty also followed Husserl and the gestalt psychologists in reminding us that we rarely have these sense experiences ‘raw’. Phenomena come to us already shaped by the interpretations, meanings and expectations with which we are going to grasp them, based on previous experience and the general context of the encounter. We perceive a multicoloured blob on a table directly as a bag of sweets, not as a collection of angles, colours and shadows that must be decoded and identified.
