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

Categorized in : World Fields Phenomenology

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

perspective self world

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

contrary determine world

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

mean book thinking

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have hi... by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

passion fortune said

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

reflection self ideas

Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

doe philosophy thinking

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

would-be order past

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

self moving thinking

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrat... by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

missions irrational century

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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

consciousness understanding self

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

perception fields world

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

numbers men reality