Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes on Knowledge
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) gave postwar French phenomenology its most rigorous account of perception as the foundational mode of cognition prior to the intellectual operations on which both empiricist and rationalist epistemologies had built. The doctrine of the body-subject — the lived body whose pre-reflective grasp of the perceptual field is the condition of every subsequent objectifying knowledge — supplies the framework against which the late incomplete The Visible and the Invisible (1964) develops the ontology of the flesh and the chiasm of the perceiver and the perceived.
Quotes
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or rather there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“We come to know the world through our body.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect.”
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“[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis”
The Visible and the Invisible , trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: 1968), p. 135 -
“Language transcends us and yet, we speak.”
p. 349 -
“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.”
p. 5 -
“Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.”
In Praise of Philosophy(1963) | p. 45