Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Nature is what has a meaning, without this meaning being posited by thought: it is the autoproduction of meaning.

Perception is not first a perception of things<.i>, but a perception of elements<.i> (water, air...) of rays of the world , of things which are dimensions, which are worlds, I slip on these 'elements' and here I am in the world , I slip from the 'subjective' to Being.

Love is not created by circumstances, or by decision; it consists in the way questions and answers are linked together--by means of an attraction, something more slips in, we discover not exactly what we were seeking, but something else that is interesting

In our very present, we discover a layer of spiritual being, i.e., of historical being, delimiting a 'space of humanity,' and geometry is offered as belonging to it, I.e., geometry is offered as connected to a past in general, to men who as such are not known by us. But this nonknowledge is a knowledge. The essence of tradition lies in being not immediately graspable in a static essence. In front of our reflection, geometry and its tradition become a hollow; they open a dimension.

Language functions with respect to thought as the body does with respect to perception...Some words only come forth in us when we have need of them...As an instrument, language is not like a hammer that has a limited number of uses. It is more like a piano, from which one can draw an infinite number of melodies.

Blind logic, logic which creates on the way.

The world is nothing but world-as-meaning

In a body activity like language, there is a blind logic, laws of equilibrium that are observed by the community of speaking subjects without any of them being conscious of it.

Experience anticipates a philosophy and philosophy is but an elucidated experience.

As a system of motor powers or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an 'I think': it is a totality of lived significations that moved toward it's equilibrium.

Marxism, rather than an affirmation of a future that is necessary, is much more a judgment of the present as contradictory and intolerable.

I do not think the world in the act of perception: it organizes itself in front of me.

Nature is the primordial--that is, the nonconstructed, the noninstituted; hence the idea of an eternity of nature (the eternal return), of a solidity. 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 psychoanalysis of objective knowledge is interminable, or rather...like every psychoanalysis, it is destined not to suppress the past, the phantasms, but to transform them from powers of death into poetic productivity, and...the very idea of objective knowledge and the idea of algorithm as a spiritual automaton and finally the idea of an object that informs itself and knows itself are, as much as any other ideas, and more than any other, supported by our reveries.

Institution of a work, like the institution of a love, intends a sense as open sense, which develops by means of proliferation, by curves, decentering and recenterimg, zigzag, ambiguous passage, with a sort of identity between the whole and the parts, the beginning and end. A sort of existential eternity by means of self-interpretation.

The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not sunstance. To designate it, we should need the old term "element," in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an "element" of Being.

The invisible is there without being an object, it is pure transcendence, without an ontic mask. And the 'visibles' themselves, in the last analysis, they too are only centered on a nucleus of absence.

It is absolutely necessary to go back, to return to Freud.

Our ideas, however limited they may be at a given moment—since they always express our contact with being and with culture—are capable of being true provided we keep them open to the field of nature and culture which they must express. And this possibility is always open to us, just because we are temporal.

It would be a mistake to believe that psychoanalysis, even for Freud, excludes the description of psychological motives and is opposed to the phenomenological method. Psychoanalysis has, on the contrary (and unwittingly), contributed to developing the phenomenological method by claiming, as Freud puts it, that every human act 'has a sense,' and by seeking everywhere to understand the event rather than to tie it to mechanical conditions.

Consciousness is not a good judge of what we are doing since we are involved in the struggle of history and in this we achieve more, less, or something else than we thought we were doing.

What is a 'decision'? A kind of failure, like the cracking of a falling tree--decision is not ex nihilo, is not of the now, always anticipated, because we are everything, everything has accomplices in us. One does not decide to do but allow to happen.

Inasmuch as there is figure, there is also inarticulate background, inasmuch as we have being (figure), we don't have it, and inasmuch as we don't have it (background), inasmuch as we let it be without thinking about it, that's when we have it.

History... is the perpetual conversation carried on between all spoken words and all valid actions, each in turn contesting and confirming the other, and each recreating all the others.