Despite the claim by contemporary commentators that Merleau-Ponty ignores the transcendental perspective of Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s final essay on Husserl, “Le Philosophe et son ombre,” is engaged in reformulating the relation between the transcendental and the mundane. The necessity for this reformulation lies in his reconsideration of the Cartesianism underlying his earlier appropriation of the phenomenological method. Merleau-Ponty ‘s later formulation of the reduction, I contend, is a historical retrieval of Platonic dialectic by way of a re-reading of the myth of the cave.