SOURCE: Levin, David Michael. “Sanity and Myth in Affective Space: A Discussion of Merleau-Ponty.” Philosophical Forum 14, no. 2 (winter 1982): 157-89.

In the following essay, Levin questions the notions of objective space and metaphysical reality in Merleau-Ponty's theories.

[E]very culture which has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Section XXIII

The mythos is that appeal of foremost and radical concern to all human beings which makes man think of what appears, what is in being.

—Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (Lecture I)

Myth means the telling word. For the Greeks, to tell is to lay bare and make appear—both the appearance and that which has its essence in the appearance, the epiphany.

—Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (Lecture I)

Modern man must first...