Quotes from book
Phenomenology of Perception

Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-PontyOriginal title Phénoménologie de la perception (French, 1945)

Phenomenology of Perception is a 1945 book by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which the author expounds his thesis of "the primacy of perception". The work established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body, and is considered a major statement of French existentialism.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty photo

“The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty photo

“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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty photo

“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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty photo

“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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty photo

“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 photo

“Language transcends us and yet, we speak.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty photo

“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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty photo

“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

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