Merleau-Ponty, quoted by Freeman (1999a, 164): ‘To perceive is to render oneself present to something through the body.’
Even if subsequently, thought and the perception of space are freed from motility and spatial being, for us to be able to conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body, and that it should have provided us with the first model of those transpositions, equivalents and identifications which make space into an objective system and allow our experience to be one of objects, opening out on an ‘in itself.’
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 164)
Merleau-Ponty (1945, 169) says that ‘The body is our general medium for having a world.’ This use of the term ‘medium’ implies that a bodymind ‘has a world’ by inhabiting it, by occupying it. In another context, Rosen (1991, 41) uses ‘ambience’ for the world as distinguished from self, while using ‘environment’ for what is distinguished from a system as its background or surround. This latter distinction is made from a third-person point of view, which emerges from the modelling relation and ‘makes space into an objective system.’
In Peircean terms, we might say that mere appearing is the Firstness of the phaneron; that its presence to one is its Secondness; that the continuity of its presence, the continuing unfolding or evolution of relations within a multidimensional space, is its Thirdness.