 Sartre’s ([1943] 1956) conception of consciousness as nothing apart from its objects can also be interpreted as a relationalist view (see McCollough 1994). And in Merleau-Ponty at least, we clearly have a version of what has since come to be known as “disjunctivism” regarding perceptual experience: for him the visual consciousness of an ashtray (his example) is either genuinely seeing the ashtray—or else (in illusory and hallucinatory cases) merely like seeing an ashtray. In the first case there is no concrete experience that would remain once the ashtray is subtracted in thought, so as to constitute an ashtray hallucination. On Merleau-Ponty’s account, ordinarily, when you see an ashtray (a chair, a tree, etc.), your visual experience is both intentional and object-dependent. Our understanding of defective, illusory and hallucinatory cases rests on an analogy with ordinary cases of visual consciousness understood in an essentially relational manner. This does not keep him from agreeing with Husserl that, given the perspectivalness of perception, there’s a sense in which one can never, in a particular case, rule out the possibility that one’s experience wasn’t relational after all. But this doesn’t make it intelligible that all one’s experience is non-relational, or make rational a global Cartesian doubt that it ever reveals the world. (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012: 308–311, 359–360, 393–396)