Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes on Mind
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) reframes the philosophy of mind around the lived body. Consciousness is not a Cartesian inner theater observing a separate physical world but the embodied perceptual engagement through which a situated subject inhabits its environment — a thesis Merleau-Ponty develops through the analysis of motor intentionality, the phantom limb, the perception of others, and the structure of habit. The late and unfinished The Visible and the Invisible (1964) extends the analysis through the chiasm — the reversibility of touching and being touched, seeing and being seen — toward an ontology of the flesh as the elemental medium of perceptual experience itself.
Quotes
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“The body is the vehicle of being in the world.”
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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:
“The world is not what I think, but what I live through.”
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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:
“It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings.”
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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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“Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”
Signs , trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: 1964), p. 203 -
“By becoming the pure subject who knows the world objectively, man ultimately realizes that absolute consciousness with respect to which the body and individual existence are no longer anything but objects; death is deprived of meaning. Reduced to the status of object of consciousness, the body could not be conceived as an intermediary between "things" and the consciousness which knows them.”
p. 204 -
“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.”
p. 8 -
“De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, “even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness.””
In Praise of Philosophy(1963) | p. 45 -
“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.”
In Praise of Philosophy(1963) | p. 46