Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Existence

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was French phenomenological philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on existence.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: 48 quotes16 likes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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