In watching an organism orient gestures toward its environment, I begin to perceive its perceiving because the internal organisation of its gestures is the same as my own conduct and tells me of my own relation to the world—in the same way, when I speak to another person and listen to him, what I understand begins to insert itself in the intervals between my saying things, my speech is intersected laterally by the other’s speech, and I hear myself in him, while he speaks to me. Here it is the same thing to speak to and to be spoken to. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World