Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Quotes
But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their 'facticity'.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
....there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
It is because we are through and through compounded of relationships with the world that for us the only way to become aware of the fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity...or yet again, to put it 'out of play'.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
...the certainties of common sense and natural attitude to things... being the presupposed basis of any thought, they are taken for granted, and go unnoticed, and because in order to arouse them and bring them to view, we have to suspend for a moment our recognition of them....
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire;....
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
...in order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it....
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
Far from being, as has been thought, a procedure of idealistic philosophy, phenomenological reduction belongs to existential philosophy: Heidegger's 'being-in-the-world' appears only against the background of the phenomenological reduction.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
The eidetic reduction is, on the other hand, the determination to bring the world to light as it is before any falling back on ourselves has occurred, it is the ambition to make reflection emulate the unreflective life of consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
The eidetic method is the method of a phenomenological positivism which bases the possible on the real.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
....there is no sphere of immanence, no realm in which my consciousness is fully at home and secure against all risk of error.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
...the contingency of the world must not be understood as a deficiency in being, a break in the stuff of necessary being, a threat to rationality, nor as a problem to be solved as soon as possible by the discovery of some deeper-laid necessity. That is ontic contingency, contingency within the bounds of the world.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
The essential point is clearly to grasp the project towards the world that we are.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
....we are nothing but a view of the world....
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
Inside and outside are inseparable.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities.... There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
A shape is nothing but a sum of limited views, and the consciousness of a shape is a collective entity.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
When I say that I have senses and that they give me access to the world, I am not the victim of some muddle... I merely express this truth which forces itself upon reflection taken as a whole: that I am able, being connatural with the world, to discover a sense in certain aspects of being without having myself endowed them with it through any constituting operation.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
We pass from double vision to the single object, not through an inspection of the mind, but when the two eyes cease to function each on its own account and are used as a single organ by one single gaze. It is not the epistemological subject who brings about the synthesis, but the body....
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
I start from unified experince and from there acquire, in a secondary way, consciousness of a unifying activity when, taking up an analytical attitude, I break up perception into qualities and sensations, and when, in order to recapture on the basis of these the object into which I was in the first place blindly thrown, I am obliged to suppose an act of synthesis which is merely the counterpart of my analysis.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body which is better informed than we are about the world...
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
...in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other. Apart from the probing of my eye or my hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
The body is our general medium for having a world.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
All consciousness is perceptual...The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
[the phenomenologist returns] to the world which precedes [scientific description], [the world] of which science always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific characterization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as is geography to the countryside
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945.
SINCE THE BEGINING of the century many great books
have expressed the revolt of life's immediacy against reason. Each
in its own way has said that the rational arrangement of Ii system
of morals or politics, or even of art, is valueless in the face of the
fervor of the moment, the explosive briliance of an individual life,
the "premeditation of the unknown."
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
Likewise, if we are to rediscover a system of morals, we must find
it through contact with the conflicts revealed by immoralism.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
As Simone de Beauvoir's book L'Invitee points out, it is a question of
knowing whether there is indeed a certain line of conduct which can
justify each man in the eyes of his fellows or whether, on the contrary,
our condition does not make al ways of beh
mutually unforgiv able and whether, in such a situation, al moral principles are not
merely a way to reassure rather than to save ourselves, a way to wave
questions aside instead of answering them.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
It is clear from his conversations with Emile Bernard that Cezanne
was always seeking to avoid the ready-made alternatives suggested to
him : sensation versus judgment ; the painter who sees against the
painter who thinks ; nature versus composition ; primitivism as opposed
to tradition.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
By remaining faithful to the phenomena in his investigations of
perspective, Cezanne discovered what recent psychologists have come
to formulate : the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is
not a geometric or photographic one .
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and
which forbids all human effusiveness. If one looks at the work of other
painters after seeing Cezanne's paintings, one feels somehow relaxed,
just as conversations resumed after a period of mourning mask the
absolute change and give back to the survivors their solidity.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
But let us make no mistake about this freedom. Let us not imagine
an abstract force which could superimpose its effects on life's "givens"
or which cause breaches in life's development.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
THE WORK of a great novelist always rests on two or three
philosophical ideas. For Stendhal, these are the notions of the Ego and
Liberty; for Balzac, the mystery of history as the appearance of a
meaning in chance events ; for Proust, the way the past is involved in
the present and the presence of times gone by. The function of the
novelist is not to state these ideas thematically but to make them exist
for us in the way that things exist. Stendhal's role is not to hold forth on
subjectivity; it is enough that he make it present.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
Intellectual works had always been concerned with
establishing a certain attitude toward the world, of which literature
and philosophy, like politics, are just diferent expressions; but only
now had this concern become explicit.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
THERE IS a perpetual uneasiness in the state of being
conscious. At the moment I perceive a thing, I feel that it was there
before me, outside my field of vision.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
Only when I discover the landscape hidden until then behind a hil does it fully become a
about to, one cannot imagine what a thing would be like if it were not to, be seen by me.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
To tell the truth, there are cracks in this construction right from the
start. Simone de Beauvoir points out some of them : the book starts
with a sacrifice on the part of Francoise.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
This eternal love of Pierre and Francoise is nonetheless temporal.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
Does one even have to say that Pierre loves Xaviere? A feeling is the
name conventionally given to a series of instants, but life, when
considered lucidly, is re duced to this swarming of instants to which
chance alone gives a common meaning. In any case, the love of
Francoise and Pierre only seemed to defy time insofar as it lost its
reality. One c lin. escape the crumbling of time only by an act of faith
which now seems to Francoise a voluntary ilusion. Al love is a verbal
construction, or at best a lifeless scholasticism.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
A t first glance Sartre's literary fate presents a mystery
to those who know him : no man could be less provocative, and yet as
an author he creates a scandal.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
When Sartre wrote that every work of art expresses a stand
takeil about the problems of human life (including political life ) , and
when he recently tried to rediscover the vital decision through which
Baudelaire arrived at the themes of his suffering and his poetry, the
same Uneasiness or anger was apparent, this time among eminent
authors.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
If humanism is the religion of man as a natural species, or the
religion of man as a perfected creature, Sartre is as far from humanism
today as he ever was.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
Wereas Catholic critics accuse Sartre of materialism, a Marxist
like H. Lefebvre comes close to reproaching him with residual idealism.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
Marxism not only tolerates freedom and the individual but, as "materialism," even gives man a dizzying responsibility, as it were.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
But whether it bears the name of,Hegel or Marx, a philosophy which renounces absolute Spirit as history's. motive force, which makes history walk on its own feet and which admits no other reason in things than that revealed by their meeting and interaction, could not af a priori man's possibility for wholeness, postulate a final synthesis resolving al contradictions or as its inevitable realization. Such a philosophy continues to see the revolutionary event as contingent and finds the date of the revolution written on no wal nor in any metaphysical heaven.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
It would be hard to deny that gestalt psychology overturns what could be called the implicit ontology of science and forces us to revise our conception of the conditions and limits of scientific knowledge for example, the ideal of an objective animal psychology.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
Because the historian is concerned with the individual and remains in contact with an inexhaustible reality, his very position makes him better anned than the sociologist against the dream of .a sovereign knowledge capable of immediate access to al times and of an absolute
objectivity.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
It means two things to say that our experience is our own : both that it is not the measure of al imaginable being in itself and that it is nonetheless co-extensive with al being of which we can form a notion. This double sense of the cogito is the basic fact of metaphysics : I am sure that there is being-on the condition that I do not seek another sort of being than being
for-me.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.
Lastly, no matter if metaphysics conceived as system has clashed with scientism, as Bergson saw, there is much more than a concordat between a metaphysics which rejects system as a matter of principle and a science which is forever becoming more exact in measuring how
much its formulas diverge from the facts they are supposed to express : there is a spontaneous convergence.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. 1964.