Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Every sensation is already pregnant with a sense.

In the last analysis, phenomenology is neither a materialism nor a philosophy of mind. It's proper work is to unveil the pre-theoretical layer on which both of these idealizations find their relative justification and are gone beyond.

The unconscious is a perceiving consciousness... it operates as such through a logic of implication or promiscuity,

The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire "work" is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences.. . .

There is in all expression a spontaneity which will not take orders, not even those which I would like to give to myself.

To love is to affirm more than one can know.

Memory is the irruption of other things in us.

The horizon is what, behind the thing, enables it to be a thing: gaps, ellipses, allusions to the sensible world, divergence, variation, difference of the 'world.

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense.

In my opinion the word 'existence,' in the sense that I have in mind, contains the following inextricably bound ideas: we are in a circumscribed environment and cannot know the whole, and if we refuse to take this whole into consideratiom, we mutilate ourselves,

Anglo-American analytic philosophy is a deliberate retreat into a universe of thought where contingency, ambiguity, and the concrete have no place.

What allows us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is invariably both freedom and servitude. Thus, to summarize, the ambiguity of being in the world is expressed by the ambiguity of our body, and this latter is understood through the ambiguity of time.

Forgetfulness and rnemory recalled are two modes of our oblique relation with a past that is present to us only through the determinate void that it leaves in us. These phenomenological descriptions are always somewhat misleading because they limit themselves to unraveling the negative in the positive and the positive in the negative.

Perception...is not the confrontation of an ob-ject. The ob-ject only speaks to me laterally, i.e., it doesn't affect me frontally, but from the side by awakening complicity in me, its presence is obsessive because it is exogenous and endogenous . I.e., it "solicits me" (Valéry)...due to a kind of postural impregnation whereby I crystallized an entire order of nascent significations on this twig.

Every memory reopens lost time and invites us to again take up the situation that it evokes.

There is not the whole of being on one side, the whole of nothingness on the other, but no more are we specialized, conditioned nothingness. Consciousness is not the flux of lived experiences, but consciousness of lacks, of open situations.

Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and "gives the whole show away." The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden

It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world an 'ever new' and 'always the same'--A sort of time of sleep. The sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other. Existential eternity. The indestructible, the barbaric Principle. Do a psychoanalysys of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother. A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology.

Sedimentation is: trace of the forgotten and thereby a call to thought which depends upon itself and goes farther...It is the experience of a resumption which is not totalization, and which precisely for that reason is able to open another development of knowledge.

Melanie Klein had distinguished the concept of ambivalence from that of ambiguity. Ambivalence is where the subject makes two alternative images for the same being; alternatives that are not seen as representing the same object. Ambiguity is an adult concept. The subject perceives two images, but he knows that they apply to the same object.

Consciousness of something is always consciousness of a difference between terms that are not given positively.

When Gestalt theory tells us that a figure against a background is the most basic sensible given we can have, this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception...Rather, this is the very definition of the perceptual phenomenon, or that without which a phenomenon cannot be called perception. The perceptual "something" is always in the middle of some other thing, it always belongs to a "field.

The moment that one understands time as chiasm then past and present are Ineinaander, each enveloping-enveloped--and that itself is the flesh.

What is required by the facts which Freud describes under the name of repression, complex, regression or resistance is only the possibility of a fragmented life of consciousness which does not possess a unique significance at all times.