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
philosophy ignorance work-out
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.
people can-do
Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful... but also when it comes to happiness.
world
The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.
phenomenology language speak
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
philosophy philosophical hands
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.
obscure explanation asks
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
self understanding consciousness
Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
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.
world foundation existence
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
essence phenomenology reservations
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
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.
philosophy thinking doe
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.
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.
missions century irrational
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.