Mereau Ponty Quotes

Merleau-Ponty's painting inhabits the same rhetoric as early cinema: it makes the invisible visible, or rather it makes visibility visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and invisible world, an order, mode, or aesthetic of visuality. Not only of the small or fast, but of visibility as such. The visuality of the visible and the invisible is found in the mixture of the body and its world, of your body and your world, all your worlds, all your bodies in this world and all those others. Painting is the process by which the visuality of the visible and invisible is made manifest: "Painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings." Each painting is a universal archive, a picture of the universe, a universal image - and like a dream. ~ Akira Mizuta Lippit

But if I did read, say, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, for instance, it always seemed to me that the parts that I understood in what he was talking about - and I read him because - well, he wrote a book, well, the Phenomenology of Perception [New York: Humanities Press, 1962]. And it seemed to me that perception had a lot do with how we take in art. ~ Robert Barry

How could it limit its investigation to one sector of reality? How could it help being pluralistic? How could it help finding the same truth everywhere? ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

The flesh is at the heart of the world. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize in what it sees the 'other side' of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. It is a self, not a transparency, like thought, which never thinks anything except by assimilating it, constituting it, transforming it into thought-- but a self by confusion, narcissism, inherence of the seer in the seen, the toucher in the touched, the feeler in the felt -- a self, then, that is caught up in things, having a front and a back, a past and a future. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Philosophy is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance - and the body is our anchorage in the world. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing...Form and content – what is said and the way in which it is said – cannot exist separately from one another. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Ideality is truly an inter-being, a cloth between 'thoughts' or production, a field in which the different, factual Einfühlungen are the partial realizations of one Speech. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dispute here) but also when it comes to happiness. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Perhaps "reality" does not belong definitively to any particular perception, that in this sense it lies always further on; but this does not authorize me to break or to ignore the bond that joins them one after the
other to the real, a bond that cannot be broken with the one without first having been established with the following...Each perception is mutable and only probable - it is, if one likes, only an opinion; but what
is not opinion, what each perception, even if false, verifies, is the belongingness of each experience to the same world, their equal power to manifest it, as possibilities of the same world...And this is why the very fragility of a perception, attested by its breakup and by the substitution of another perception, far from authorizing us to efface the index of "reality" from them all, obliges us to concede it to all of them, to recognize all of them to be variants of the same world, and finally to consider them not as all false but as "all true," not as repeated failures in the determination of the world but as progressive approximations...It is the prepossession of a
totality which is there before one knows how and why, whose realizations are never what we would have imagined them to be, and which nonetheless fulfills a secret expectation within us, since we believe in it tirelessly. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

I do not believe that what one gives to the sciences is taken from philosophy. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

It is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a Communist. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are affected in the first place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four and
soon to two colours; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached, although the pathological colour is never identifiable with any normal one. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions 'the loss of nervous substance results not only in a deficiency of certain qualities, but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive structure'. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

An abyss is not nothing; it has environs & edges. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

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 (to look at it ohne mitzumachen, as Husserl often says), or yet again, to put it 'out of play'. Not because we reject the certainties of common sense and a natural attitude to things - they are, on the contrary, the constant theme of philosophy - but because, 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. The best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl's assistant, when he spoke of 'wonder' in the face of the world. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that 'one' perceives in me, and not that I perceive. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

The concept of Nature does not evoke only the residue of what had not been constructed by me, but also a productivity which is not ours, although we can use it--that is, an originary productivity that continues beneath the artificial creations of man. It both partakes of the most ancient, and is something always new. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Personal life, expression, knowledge, and history advance obliquely, and not directly, toward ends or toward concepts. That which is sought too deliberately is not obtained. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood. ~ 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

The world and I are within one another. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

I discover vision, not as a "thinking about seeing," to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

The imaginary is lodged in the world. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Visible being is natural...But language, art, history gravitate around the invisible (ideality). ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and though them, all the rest. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one to have his passion as a profession. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

The negative principle is less identity-with-self than non-difference-with-self. This absence becomes a factor only by negation of its own negation. It is less a unity of the multiple in the living than an adhesion between the elements of the multiple. In a sense, there is only the multiple, and this totality that surges from it is not a totality in potential, but the establishment of a certain dimension. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Activity = passivity. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty