There are three “convergences” that Merleau-Ponty sees between Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s ontology, more precisely, what remains "unthought" in Husserl and Heidegger’s explicit thinking.

The first and most general is that Husserl’s idea of the genesis of sense (Stiftung) converges with Heidegger’s idea of the Ereignis of Being. We can see this same convergence in the course "la philosophie aujourd'hui"; at the end of his discussion of Heidegger there, Merleau-Ponty says that the philosophic sense of his course on nature consists in "the advent of being," and adds between parentheses "cf. Husserl Ineinander and Einfühlung." Husserl’s idea of the genesis of sense converges with Heidegger’s idea of the advent of Being because Husserl does not define the genesis of sense as what Merleau-Ponty calls a "horizontal history," meaning a succession of causal events. Thus Merleau-Ponty can say that the relation between the origin and its sedimentation in Husserl is "vertical," "vertical history". It is, of course, Heidegger who provides Merleau-Ponty with the idea of vertical Being, when he speaks of the ground as an Abgrund, an abyss, in the essay "Language".

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