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
names say-anything world
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.
world body phenomenology
The body is our general medium for having a world.
phenomenology sides language
Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.
metamorphosis photograph instant
The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
expression empathy feels
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
motivation decision labels
Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual’ . There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.
world
The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.
phenomenology language speak
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
obscure explanation asks
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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.
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.
missions century irrational
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.