Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In this exchange between the subject of sensation and the sensible, it cannot be said that one acts while the other suffers the action, nor that one gives sense to the other...The sensible gives back to me what I had lent to it, but I received it from the sensible in the first place.

The genesis of the whole by composition of the parts is fictitious. It arbitrarily breaks the chain of reciprocal determinations,..Each chronaxie is but one aspect of the total process; it is by abstraction that it is treated as a local event. In the nervous system there are only global events.

Time is not a line, but rather a network of intentionalities.

Surpassing surpasses only through recurrence.

Psychological reflection, however, obliges us to place the precise world back into its cradle of consciousness, to ask ourselves how the very idea of the precise world or of precise truth is possible, and to seek out its first springing forth into consciousness. (...) Consciousness must be brought face to face with its unreflective life in things and must awaken to its own, forgotten, history - this is the true role of philosophical reflection.

In the horizon, there is no subject and object. We are there like the others; we are, like the others, drawn out of this horizonal being, divergences or variants in relation to it.

There is a self-knowledge that is not knowledge and is not self-consciousness; there is a presence of the past that is not in fact given in it, but also not what I will in the instant; and there is a doing that is not the fiat of a closed signification.

Signification is always the divergence: what the other says appears to me to be full of meaning because his lacunae are never where mine are. Perspective multiplicity.

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

This phenomenology, however, is always on the horizon, because it is the will to exhaust the things themselves, which are inexhaustible. What makes it already be there--never there--is its radicalism, which gives way to an impassioned fermentation.

There is equal weakness in blaming ourselves alone and in believing only in external causes. In one way or another we will always miss the mark if we do. Evil is not created by us or by others; it is born in this web that we have spun about us—and that is suffocating us. What sufficiently tough new men will be patient enough to really reweave it?

My organism--as a pre-personal adhesion to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence--plays the role of an innate complex beneath the level of my personal life. My organism is not like some inert thing, it itself sketches out the movement of existence.

Institution...is neither perceived nor thought as a concept. It is the wherewithal on which I count at eh moment, which is seen nowhere and is assumed by everything that is visible for a human beimg, it is what is at issue each moment and which has no name and no identity in our theories of consciousness.

The Umwelt is less and less oriented toward a goal and more and more toward the interpretation of symbols.

What the animal shows is not the manifestation of a finality, but rather of an existential value of manifestation, of presentation. What the animal shows is not utility; rather, its appearance manifests something that resembles our oneiric life.

I do not perceive simply "things" but also use-objects: an article of clothing, for example...Nerve functioning distributes not only spatial and chromatic values but also symbolic values.

The living physiology of the nervous system can only be understood by starting from phenomenal givens.

Trace: presence of an absent: experience of an absence.

Personal existence is intermittent

This is where the mystification of institution comes from: as knowledge, it is necessary that institution is also ignorance, as ignorance (of its actual functioning) institution is also the knowledge of it (since it is in history as use value).

To think: to encircle an unthought.

A determinate emptiness: a lack, a privation, a dimension (new type of intellectual existence).

There are several ways for the body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.