Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Pontywas a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, and politics. He was on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine created by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth14 March 1908
CountryFrance
Maurice Merleau-Ponty quotes about
obscure explanation asks
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
world foundation existence
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
missions century irrational
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
reflection self ideas
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.
world determine contrary
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.
essence phenomenology reservations
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
giving-up real thinking
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.
perception body speak
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.
self understanding consciousness
Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
passion fortune said
It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession.
heart flesh world
The flesh is at the heart of the world.
art philosophy medicine
The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
past order horizon
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.
may language speak
I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.