Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is a classic of modern philosophy, comparable to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, a classic of modern philosophy.
If the latter describes the self-movement and structure of the mind, the former can be contrasted with the description of the self-experience and structure of the body.
The latter can be read as the perfected version of modern philosophy, represented by consciousness-centeredness, and the former as the reverse version of that perfected version.
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is a masterpiece that brought about a new era by turning the gaze and feet of Western philosophy, which was focused on consciousness, back to the body.
It can be called a 'corporeal turn', like Kant's Copernican turn and Rorty's linguistic turn, which brought about a self-transformation of philosophy in the history of Western philosophy.


Merleau-Ponty's physical turn is an event that inherited and developed Husserl's later thought, and not only demonstrated the unhindered openness of phenomenological thinking, but also, to borrow Merleau-Ponty's expression, "by making phenomenology exist as it is practiced," shed light on resolving the age-old fundamental problem of Western philosophy, namely the long-standing opposition between empiricism and intellectualism.
“The cognizing mind is an embodied mind.” Just as Husserl founded phenomenology as a response to the threat of naturalism, Merleau-Ponty put forward the phenomenology of the body as a critique of empiricist and intellectualist philosophy.
He regarded perceptual experience as a 'classical bias' and returned to the 'phenomenon of the body' in order to overcome it, clarify the roots of objectivist philosophy, and fundamentally criticize and explain it.
The transition from Husserl's a priori consciousness to the body is the starting point of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.
Therefore, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is established not by constructing the body from the transcendental ego, but by counter-constructing transcendental consciousness from the body.
No, it should be seen as having achieved more than that.