Meaning begins with perception of the Lebenswelt (proposed by Husserl), the Lived World
Our experience of perception comes from our being present] at the moment when things, truths, and values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent Logos; that it teaches us, outside of all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that is summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary, rediscovered when it is made to appear against the background of non-human nature.
Merleau-Ponty Primacy of Perception,1945,
Perception starts, according to Merleau-Ponty, with the preconscious moment the external comes into contact with the body. The conscious interpretation of input, as neurologists have affirmed, follows the experience by a significant lapse.
