"Yet the initial solipsistic moment of this encounter is not to be dismissed as simply mistaken. On the contrary, in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty argues that solipsism is a pervasive and significant aspect of our experience of others. I do tend, even prereflectively, to constitute another as merely a figure in my field of vision-until a sudden recognition of "reciprocity" decenters that perception (PP, 356-57). But even before such a decentering, the existence of other people presents me with difficulties. In solipsism I initially seem to transcend other people: they only exist for me as objects of my experience. But the problem is that I still cannot avoid recognizing them as "people" - that is, as beings "like myself." Less dramatically than the executioner's sudden discovery of himself in his victim, I still discover that people do not stand before me like other objects of perception, such as rocks or buildings. But recognizing them as people, even antagonistically so, then presents me with "the absurdity of a multiple solipsism" (le ridicule d'un solipsisme a plusieurs) (PP, 359).

A way out of this paradox that may be chosen - but that may also be refused; there are no guarantees - is to recognize that solipsism is but one "moment" of our relation to the world, and of the dialectic in which we may both deny and sustain one another. "Solitude and communication cannot be the two horns of a dilemma," Merleau-Ponty writes, but are rather "two 'moments' of one phenomenon, since in fact other people do exist for me" (PP, 359). For, finally, as we may realize, "the refusal to communicate is still a form of communication" (PP, 361)."