Merleau-Ponty- "The Phenomenology of Perception" I

The movement of the first time, the establishment of a new a priori, a sense-organ. The movement, which allows me to go further, to reorganize the background from whence this perception emerged as intelligible, as something to be understood. Paramount to the account Merleau-Ponty gives us, is that Perception is an originating realm and that the body is that strange unity which is both ‘intentional’ (toward things), and ‘sense-giving’ (constitutive of those things). The body is the site between the movement of active constitution and passive appropriation. This movement is our movement, the ‘founding relation’ whereby we come to have recourse to something like the sedimentation of an a priori. What comes to light in the movement of the “first perception,” in the truth of the first time? Furthermore, how does this experience fit into his criticism of the intellectualist and empiricist accounts?
In the first place, we would come across colours upon a different sort of background, a background which is the projection of a sedimented history, something like the history of our experiences to date. While colours would not yet form any part of our perceptual experience, in the truth of the first time, we would gain access to them as a kind of indeterminate experience. Faced with the ambiguity of the indeterminate experience we would take it up into ourselves, in a movement of appropriation, such that the background, or the history of our experience to date will be altered in the wake of this novel experience. In this movement, the movement between the passive encounter with the first appearance of colour, and its appropriation into the now altered structure of consciousness, we render the indeterminate content of experience determinate. The structure of consciousness has been altered in the wake of this movement, in view of its capacity to understand, or reactivate the truth of the first colour experience. This experience opens up a new dimension of possible experience; it is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty invokes the notion of horizons and the possibility of extending or broadening their scope. It is the case, therefore, that every subsequent encounter with colour will be founded upon the truth of the first time. The establishment of a necessary structure, an a priori, in turn assures that the truth of the first time remains present every time. This is not to say that this structure is static, or does not undergo alterations and refinements of its own, but rather that each subsequent colour experience is already understood in terms of the a priori sedimented in the appropriation of the inaugurating experience.
This account is essential to the sustained critique of the intellectualist and empiricist traditions, in that it provides and account of learning which is suspiciously absent in either account. Merleau-Ponty provides an account about how it is that we come to understand the world in terms of the experiences we have therein. We do not perceive things in the world as a kind of ‘tabula rasa,’ but rather as already part of a tradition, which interprets. It is therefore the case that even in our founding movements, in the truths of the inaugural perceptions they are already part of a framework, or background of previously interpreted phenomena. For Merleau-Ponty, among the primary task seems to be an attempt to get behind, or perhaps underneath these inaugural experiences in order to make manifest the layers of a priori sedimentation that contribute to the interpretation of indeterminate phenomena in certain determinate ways.