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Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, and politics. He was on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine established by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945.

At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, linguistics, and politics. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences and especially with descriptive psychology. It is through this engagement that his writings have become influential in the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and cognitive science.

Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call “indirect ontology” or the ontology of “the flesh of the world” , seen in his final and incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, and his last published essay, “Eye and Mind”.

✵ 14. March 1908 – 3. May 1961
Maurice Merleau-Ponty photo

Works

Phenomenology of Perception
Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: 24   quotes 16   likes

Famous Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes

“The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception

“Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes about the world

“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception

“We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception

“Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 44

“The function [of objective thinking] is to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite the thing and the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make up our world (to the exclusion of the modes of appearance which we have described), and preferably visual qualities, because these give the impression of being autonomous, and because they are less directly linked to our body and present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmosphere. But in reality all things are concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain atmosphere.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception (1945), p. 374

“Lichtenberg … held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. … It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was “strange” (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), pp. 45-46

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes

“All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness […] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find […] a being which immediately recognises itself, […] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception

Idea , Time

“It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.””

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 4

Passion

“What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 5
Context: Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.

Knowledge

“Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and “gives the whole show away.” The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 59
Context: Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and “gives the whole show away.” The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.

Feeling

“Language transcends us and yet, we speak.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception (1945), p. 349

“Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical discourse. But for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest. It is never content to accept its historical situation. It changes this situation by revealing it to itself.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 57

Life , History , Change

“Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 45

Religion , Understanding

“De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, “even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness.””

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 45

God , Search , Birth , Problem

“Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not “a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.””

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 8

Books , Faith , Thinking

“The philosopher will ask himself … if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 47

God , History , Falseness

“Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 46

Thinking

“[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: 1968), p. 135

Art

“Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: 1964), p. 203

Understanding

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