Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The unconscious: excess of the perceptual over the notional.

Alg?m görsel, dokunsal ve i?itsel verilerin toplam? de?ildir. Bütün varl???mla, bütünlüklü bir ?ekilde alg?alr?m: Ayn? anda tüm duygular?ma konu?an biricik bir yap?y?, biricik bir varl?k biçimini kavrar?m.

What's a level? It's a typical activity, it's the universal context of an action in the world. Perceptual consciousness often consists in noticing divergence in relation to a level, and this divergence is the sense which is thus configuration or structure. This sense is less possessed than it is practiced: perhaps it can't be defined, but every aberrant fact is lived as deviation in relation to it. Thus perception adjusts imperfect circles, goes toward good forms.

Very few philosophers have been anarchists. Nearly all of them admit that a State and a power are necessary. They do not wash their hands of it, and yet they do not consent to the myth. Or, when they do, they nonetheless give warning that it is a myth. This is the source of their uneasiness. It is not an anomaly or an aristocratic malady.

The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind.

Infantile prehistory does not remain inert in the adult. Rather, infantile prehistory is perpetually re-created by the adult's current attitudes.

L'Être est ce qui exige de nous création pour que nous en ayons l'expérience.

What is at issue is to recognize the operation in us which is us and which is not ours.

The real is a tightly woven fabric; it does not wait for our judgments in order to incorporate the ,ostensibly surprising of phenomena, nor to reject the ostensibly convincing of ournimaginings. Perception is not a science of the world, nor even an act or a deliberate taking of a stand; it is the background against which all acts stand out and is thus presuppose by them.

Lebenswely = ...wild being and wild mind--'mute' experience that must itself speak.

Power is of the order of the tacit.

What lives in Nature is not mind or spirit, but rather the beginning of meaning in the process of ordering itself, but which has not fully emerged. The subject has to intervene in order to bring meaning out fully, but this disengagement of meaning is not constituting.

Philosophy, precisely as 'Being speaking within us,' expression of the mute experience by itself, is creation. A creation that is at the same time a reintegration of Being...for...it knows itself to be a Gebilde and wishes to surpass itself as pure Gebilde, to find again its origin. It is hence a creation in a radical sense: a creation that is at the same time an adequation, the only way to obtain an adequation...Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it.

These clarifications allow us to understand motricity unequivocally as original intentionality. Consciousness is originally not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can.

I found in the experience of the perceived world a new type of relation between the mind and truth...We experience in it a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.

Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities.

Philosophy...is a question....The human being is a question for God himself. We are not masters of this question.

We are the parents of a Nature of which we are also the children

Circularity--a dangerous word. Circularity of Heraclitus, yes: to go in one direction is truly to go in the other. A thick identity there, which truly contains difference.

There is no absolute 'in-itself,' and no absolute 'for us'—for the same reasons, i.e., their reciprocal relativization, their 'mutual coincidence.' -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

With the cogito begins the struggle between consciousnesses in which, as Hegel says, each one seeks the death of the other. For this battle to even begin, for each consciousness to even suspect the external presences that it negates, they must have a common ground and they must remember their peaceful coexistence in the world of childhood.

The (ultimate) formula: 'the absolute is the subject' does not mean that there is only a subject. The 'free' is freedom of the free and the related. The absolute is the 'sameness' of the absolute and the relative. The true subject is the subjectivity of the subject and the object. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The contact with the perceived is not ignorance and is not knowledge.

True philosophy does not go 'behind:' behind the 'appearance' and behind what is in the world. Philosophy cannot conceive the absolute except as the other side of the 'appearance' or the phenomenon. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel