Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

History, then, is neither a perpetual novelty nor a perpetual repetition, but rather the unique movement that both creates forms and shatters them.

Psychoanalysis is, indeed, in the final analysis, existential psychoanalysis, but not in Sartre's sense, that is to say, as revelation of a position taken by 'freedom,' but as revelation of intercorporeality, of the ego-others assembly such as it is realized by each, of the symbolic system set up in our machine for living.

We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon.

According to Hegel, one attains the absolute by way of a phenomenology (the appearance of mind; mind in the phenomenon). This is not because the phenomenal mind is on one level of a scale, after which one moves on to the absolute, but because the absolute would not be absolute if it did not appear as absolute. Phenomenology is the whole truth from a certain point of view.

Beneath Cartesian nature, which theoretical activity sooner or later constructs, there emerges an anterior stratum, which is never suppressed, and which demands justification once the development of knowledge reveals the gaps in Cartesian science

Bodily functions take place in a psychic dimension. The digestive tube not only serves for digestion, but is also a manner of entering into relationship with the world.

My clothes can become appendages of my body.

Life is not only an organization for survival; there is in life a prodigious flourishing of forms, the utility of which is only rarely attested to and that sometimes even constitutes a danger for the animal...Adaptation is not the canon of life, but a particular realization in the tide of natural production...It can be perfectly argued that life is not uniquely submitted to the principle of utility, and that there is a morphogenesis in the design of expression.

The actions in which I habitually engage incorporate their instruments and make them participate in the original structure of my own body. Moreover, my own body is the primordial habit, the one that conditions all others and by which they can be understood.

We must define 'organism' as everything that has defined norms, an a priori that governs what happens.

Philosophy turns towards the anonymous symbolic activity from which we emerge, and towards the personal discourse which develops in us, and which, indeed, we are.

In psychology, we cannot dispense with the need for an appeal to lived experience, and it is clear that Piaget's schema does not respond to the experience of the subject.

The visible has to be described as something that is realized through man, but which is nowise anthropology. Nature as the other side of man (as flesh--nowise as 'matter'). Logos also as what is realized in man, but nowise as his property.

The derangement of the senses is to break through the partitions between them in order to regain their indivision--And through this, a thought not mine but theirs...Things speak through me.

I never rejoin the other's lived experience. It is in the world that we rejoin one another.

One does not love a person, one does not love a body, one loves a life established in a body.

History does not provide me with its sense ready-made. I have to remake it, but my interactions with history form me, they give way to a labor at the end of which I cannot say that I donate sense, for my criteria are put in question there...Here to receive is to give, in effect, but to give is to receive. Such is the sense of the notion of field and of institution: they give what they do not have and what we receive from them, we bring to them.

If objects must never show me more than one of their sides, then this is because I myself am in a certain place from which I can see them, but which I cannot see.

Anyone who thinks about the matter finds it astonishing that very often a good painter can also make good drawings or good sculpture. Since neither the means of expression nor the creative gestures are comparable, this fact is proof that there is a system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses—a conceptless presentation of universal Being.

The perceived world is a world where there is discontinuity, where there is probability and generality, where each being is not constrained to a unique and fixed location, to an absolute density of being.

Since sane people find the insane impenetrable and irreducible, they consider themselves the sole owners of rationality.

The world is originally perceived as a total, if not complete, organization where effects are still bound up with causes before all intellectual representation...In perception causality is elucidated.

Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity.

Ambiguity is essential to human existence, and everything we live or think always has several senses.