Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Verflechtung(interweaving, entanglement with others). Means finally: We are not one side of the wall but two. And finally: We are not perspectives upon a surveyor's plan (for then one would not understand substitution). We are two in one Being. Make a chapter in my book: Being and Memory (memory as a particular case of inter-being).

Our glances are not "acts of consciousness," each of which claims an invariable priority, but openings of our flesh which are immediately filled by the universal flesh of the world.

Relations with the other are always complicated...Even if we make an effort to respect the autonomy of the other, even if we grant the other freedom, the other will never feel completely free since he receives his freedom in a partnership.

Dialectic is not a property of consciousness, rather consciousness is the property of dialectic. Dialectic has consciousness. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The life of thought transforms its own notions. Would not a thought in equilibrium actually be an absence of thought? Thought should be known in states of equilibrium, but in relative and nonfinal states of equilibrium. We know that our most profound convictions will be completed and modified by our future experiences. All equilibrium of thought contains in itself an evolutionary seef.

Perception teaches us an ontology that it alone can reveal to us.

No more than the sky or the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a logical possibility of conception, or a system of 'potentiality of consciousness': it is a new type of being, a being by porosity, or by generality, and the one before whom the horizon opens is caught up, englobed, within it.

The instability of levels produces not only the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our own contingency and the horror with which it fills us.

Human beings are also trundled-human being--if we could open us, we would find all the others, as in Russion dolls, or rather less well-ordered, in a state of indivision.

Each perception is a vibration of the world, it touches well beyond what it touches, it awakens echoes in all my being in the world, it is super-significant.

Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. "Nature is on the inside," says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not "say" as by what it "says"? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?

The natural 'thing,' the organism, the behavior of others and my own behavior exist only by their meaning; but this meaning which springs forth in them is not yet a Kantian object; the intentional life which constitutes them is not yet a representation; and the 'comprehension' which gives access to them is not yet an intellection.

We experience a perception and its horizon "in action" rather than by "posing" them or explicitly "knowing" them.

Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not an object at all; it is not really set out in front of us. It is our soil — not what is in front of us, facing us, but rather, that which carries us.

The thing offers itself as preliminary, primordial, anterior to all perception, like a landscape that is there before us and just as we will see it afterward...But at the same time, I can posit this universe anterior to me only as I perceive it...Bergson thus posits consciously a paradox inherent to perception: Being is anterior to perception, and this primordial Being is conceivable only in relation to perception.

In the movement of experience, which brings understanding, we reach the absolute which is not something behind it or under it, but which is a water-mark within it and which exists only as a water-mark. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Love cannot be given a name by the lover who lives it...If we are situated, then we are surrounded and cannot be transparent to ourselves, and thus our contact with ourselves must only be accomplished in ambiguity.

The body schema is not perceived--It is the norm or privileged position in contrast to which the perceived body is defined. It is prior to explicit perception.

The structure of behavior is neither thing nor consciousness, and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind.

The adoption of a level presupposes the expressive relation between the perceived and ourselves, presupposes our settling into it, that is to say, the raising of certain of its elements to the status of dimensions...The sensible thing speaks a certain language to us which we understand just as if a linguistic agreement were established between our perceptual system and it, as if we spoke its language without having learned it = expression.

There is a ti,e inherent to Nature. This time, in Whitehead, is inherent to the things, it embaces us, to the extent that we participate in the things, or that we take part in the process of Nature. It is essential for us, but insofar as we are Nature. Subjectivity is caught up in the system of a cosmic time, in a subjectivity of Nature.

My possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive...in short, I am never at one with myself.

Empathy makes it that there is "the one" and not "the same.