Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes & Sayings

It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

We know not through our intellect but through our experience. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

This also means that philosophy itself must not take itself as established in the truths it has managed to utter, that philosophy is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning, and finally, that radical reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life that is its initial, constant, and final situation. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

We might say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself
or that the world is at the heart of our flesh. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Expression is like a step taken in the fog
no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

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

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

History flows neither from the past nor to the future alone: it reverses its course and, when you get right down to it, flows from all the presents. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

It would then be found that the words, vowels, and phonemes are so many ways of 'singing' the world. The initial form of language, therefore, would have been a kind of song. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis — Maurice Merleau Ponty

An abyss is not nothing; it has environs & edges. — 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

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. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

We do not have the right to level out all experience into a single world. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

But the spectacle perceived does not partake of pure being. Taken exactly as I see it, it is a moment of my individual history, and since sensation is a reconstitution, it pre-supposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution, so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

My past has its space, its paths, its nameplaces, and its monuments. Beneath the crossed but distinct orders of succession and simultaneity, beneath the train of synchronizations added onto line by line, we find a nameless network
constellations of spatial hours, of point-events. Should we even say 'thing,' should we say 'imaginary' or 'idea,' when each thing exists beyond itself, when each fact can be a dimension, when ideas have their regions? The whole description of our landscape and the lines of our universe, and of our inner monologue, needs to be redone. Colors, sounds, and things
like Van Gogh's stars
are the focal points and radiance of being. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

To think is not having but not having. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always will be that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general - as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use. — 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

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational. — 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

Any commemoration is also a betrayal. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary ... — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it demands. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency. — 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 will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh? — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Language transcends us and yet we speak. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which like paternity seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which one chooses to call 'natural' followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man as it were in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Faith--in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified-enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal
with the existing world. Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in
that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustibJe and our information limited. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with "word-meanings", it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

If this world is a poem, it is not because we see the meaning of it at first but on the strength of its chance occurrences and paradoxes. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The body is our general medium for having a world. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The generality of time, of a family of times, is derived from the fact that all these times are enveloped in a process of nature. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Everything is science and everything is philosophy. — 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

We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either in us or in it. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

In advocating nonviolence one reinforces established violence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man. — 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

Very few philosophers have been anarchists — Maurice Merleau Ponty

I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it ... If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one's own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees. — 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

To abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once. — 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

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

We speak of 'inspiration,' and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing inside the thing but other smaller things. — 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

The Absolute is not only the Absolute, but also the dialectical movement of finite and infinite. The Absolute is such that it only ever appears to an other. Just as our intuition is an ek-stasis, by which we try to situate ourselves in the Absolute, so too must the Absolute leave itself and make itself in the world. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Nature gives us a dispersed finality. It is a demonology, full of supranatural forces, not one of which is supernatural. On this terrain of knowledge, one must be polytheist. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Stiftung is not enveloping thought, but open thought, not the intended and Vorhabe of an actual center, but an 'off-center' which will be rectified, not the positing of an end, but the positing of a style, not a frontal grasp but a lateral divergence, algae brought back from the depths. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

Said by whom? Said to whom? Not by a mind to a mind, but by a being who has body and language to a being who has body and language, each drawing the other by invisible threads like those who hold the marionettes-making the other speak, think, and become what he is but never would have been by himself. Thus things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us. There is said to be a wall between us and others, but it is a wall we build together, each putting his stone in the niche left by the other. Even reason's labors presuppose such infinite conversations. All those we have loved, detested, known, or simply glimpsed speak through our voice. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

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

There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

What is essential to the unconscious is that out life, precisely because it is not a consciousness of others, in indifferent balance, but a node of significations which are traces of events, consisting of excrescences and gaps, forms a baroque system. Exactly as an adult or elderly body has its dynamic, its privileged positions, its style of gestures, and its syntax, an implex has its wrinkles and its own balancing processes, and the unconscious is our practical schema, where everything is inscribed in shillings and pence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

There is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Moonlight and sunlight in our memory are presented before all else, not as sensory contents, but as a certain type of symbiosis, a certain manner that the outside has of invading us, a certain manner that we have of receiving it. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no question of dissolving it through some 'solution,' it is beneath the level of solutions. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Activity = passivity. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The world and Being hold together only in movement; it is only in this way that all things can be together. Philosophy is a reminding of this being. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

If myths, dreams and illusion are to be possible, the apparent and the real must remain ambiguous in the subject as in the object. — Maurice Merleau Ponty