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
essence phenomenology reservations
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
phenomenology language speak
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
order two phenomenology
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.
children believe phenomenology
The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
reflection historical phenomenology
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 through them, all the rest.
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.
world body phenomenology
The body is our general medium for having a world.
phenomenology world fields
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.
book mean thinking
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.
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.