Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us and so on without end, and language is not like a prison we are locked into or a guide we must blindly follow; for what these linguistic gestures mean and gain us such complete access to that we seem to have no further need of them to refer to it finally appears at the intersection of all of them.

Prior to stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.

As an advent of the impersonal, repression is a universal phenomenon.

We would not know even what the false is, if there were not times when we had distinguished it from the true...If we are to be able to speak of falsity, we do have to have experiences of truth.

For me, philosophy consists in giving another name to what has long been crystallized under the name of God.

This unconscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back of our 'consciousness,' but in front of us, as articulations in our field. It is 'unconscious' by not being object but by being that through which objects are possible, it is the constellation from which our future may be read.

We inherit powers which are not immediately ours. I record the results of an activity of which I am not a part.

The manner in which the child assumes his relations with the family constellation can be read in the type of perception and knowledge that he accomplishes.

Historical invention works through a matrix of open and unfinished significations presented by the present. Like the touch of a sleepwalker, it touches in things only what they have in them that belongs to the future.

Discoveries' in philosophy are always at the same time inventions...Truth is not ready-made in things, and yet, by a 'retrograde movement,' it presents itself to us as existing prior to our act of knowledge. We encounter reality: that is the cause and effect of the knowledge we have of it. This circle is the definition of history, and it is up to the philosopher to learn to live with it.

In the last analysis each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

For the psychoanalyst, what is original is the structure of the body as an emblem of life.

The perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things (which are not things and are not nothimg, but on the contrary mark out by themselves the fields of possible variation in the same thing and the same world)

We must stop thinking in terms of causality. Or again we must admit that we are dealing with a webbed causality and not a linear causality.

With psychoanalysis mind passes into body, as inversely, body passes into mind.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

If it is true that I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of of the world.

Method proper to the understanding of dreams: reverie over dreams, hermeneutics reverie. Because it is not something said, but an echo through totality. It is this system of echoes which also constitutes the oneirism of wakefulness.

Transcendence means nothing outside of the notion of the 'flesh.' With the notion of the flesh, mean: there is an explosion toward the world or being. I participate in this explosion like other human bodies. This explosion is not made 'in me,' but in front of me. It is like a fuse held in front of my objective body, which the body lights itself, but which is not one of its properties: I am, along with my body, only the one who lights this conflagration.

The psychology of men and women in our civilization does not signal an eternal masculine or feminine...We must not...consider the attributes of the woman or the man as natural, but as historical.

It is only afterwards, once human invention has reintegrated them in the meaning of the totality, that the hazards of history can appear to be and are in fact rational without there being any place for the assumption of a hidden reason which orients them through the "ruse" of appearing in the guise of contingency.

What we understand by the concept of institution are those events in experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history--or again those events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as survivals or residues, but as the invitation to a sequel, the necessity of a future.

The essences by necessity will not be the "answer" philosophy calls for, any more than are the facts. The "answer" is higher than the "facts," lower than the "essences," in the wild Being where they were, and—behind or beneath the cleavages of our acquired culture—continue to be, undivided.

Philosophy seeks to be philosophy while remaining non-philosophy, i.e. a 'negative philosophy' (in the sense of 'negative theology'). 'Negative philosophy' has access to the absolute, not as 'beyond,' as a positive second order, but another order which must be on this side, the double, inaccessible without being passed through. True philosophy scoffs at philosophy; true philosophy is a-philosophical. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel