Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

There has to be an ideality which has need of time.

It is not true that everything is actual; there is an actuality of the possible as possible, that is, the notion of an outline, the being of becoming actual that is certain possibilities.

One finds societies which do not have an Oedipus complex (cf. Malinowski). The Oedipus complex might be an 'institutiton' tied to the structure of our society.

In each visible, all of the visible...Overlapping, total part--no break between Nature and humanity.

It is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing...Form and content – what is said and the way in which it is said – cannot exist separately from one another.

All vision, no matter what color it may be, is a kind of thoughtscreen (which allows for the overflowing of other thoughts)-- Vorhabe and sedimentation.

There is a sort of maleficence in history: it solicits men, tempts them so that they believe they are moving in its direction, and then suddenly it unmasks, and events change and prove that there was another possibility. The men whom history abandons in this way and who see themselves simply as accomplices suddenly find themselves the instigators of a crime to which history has inspired them. And they are unable to look for excuses or to excuse themselves from even a part of the responsibility.

The inside is seen in the outside--grasps it better than itself. Relation to the outside that is not 'representation' but ecstasy...And reciprocally, the visible is the transactions, the chemistry, the music, and interrelationship and the 'operation of interests' [Claudel] of Anima.

Those who resisted were neither madmen nor wise men; they were heroes—men in whom passion and reason were identical, who in the obscurity of desire did what history expected and what was later to appear as the truth of the moment. We cannot remove the element of reason in their choice any more than the element of audacity and risk of failure.

Stimuli...are given to neural elaboration and translated into a linguistic system of the nervous system. Between the exterior world and the living organism, there is an insertion of a whole that orders, coordinates, and interprets: the nervous system is a mirror of the world...The higher animal thus constructs an Umwelt that has a Gegenwelt, a rejoinder in its nervous system.

1. Nature possesses a temporal character: it passes, like time. 2. Nature is only ever process: we only ever grasp it in its manifestations, without these manifestations ever exhausting it. 3. It is essential for Nature to pass. There is not Nature on the one hand, and its process as attribute on the other. Nature is pure process. It is comparable to the being of a wave, the reality of which is only global and not fragmentary.

Obscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety,

We must understand life as the opening of a field of action. The animal is produced by the production of a milieu, that is, by the appearing in the physical world of a field radically different from the physical world with its specific temporality and spatiality,

If we want to understand the process of Nature in itself, we could say that Nature is the memory of the world.

The objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body...which has merely a conceptual existence.

Evolution, embryogenesis: The body - object is only a trace--Trace in the mechanical sense: present substitute of a past that no longer is--the trace for us is more than the present effect of the past. It is a survival of the past, an enjambment. The trace and the fossil: ammonite. The living thing is no longer there but it is almost there; we have the negative of it.

Freudians argue that the psychological structure is the cause of civilization. Malinowski replaces a psychological causality with a sociological causality and takes the Oedipus complex as a product of civilization. But it is evident that the one thesis and the other are both inseparable and contradictory. We must construct a psychoanalysis and a sociology...which overtakes and synthesizes classical givens.

Our open and personal existence rests upon an initial foundation of acquired and congealed existence.

Silent speech through which the thing dengt and the world Weltet .

Culture constantly impregnates the newborn from the first day,

In between the microscopic facts, global reality is delineated like a watermark, never graspable for objectivizing-particularizing thinking, never eliminate from or reducible to the microscopic: we had only a bit of protoplasmic jelly, and we then have an embryo, by a transformation which, always too early or too late, we were never witness to in our investment in a biological field.

The paradox of history...is that a contingent future, once it enters the present, appears real and even necessary.

Painting...gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a "muscular sense" in order to possess the voluminosity of the world. This voracious vision, reaching beyond the "visual givens," opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house.

But this 'structural' or concrete a priori is neither a Kantian category nor even a Hegelian idea; it is the universal ground of sense=the sense funally, far fro, being an idea, is a ground. Philosophy seeks in the archeology of the ground, in the depth and not in the height (the ideas)...the ground in the literal sense: the earth.