Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The task of philosophy should be to describe this labyrinth, to elaborate a concept of being such that its contradictions, neither accepted nor "transcended," still have their place. What was impossible for modern dialectical philosophies, because the dialectic which they contained remained bound by a predialectical ontology, would become possible in an ontology which reveals in being itself an overlap or movement.

The idea of institution is precisely the foundation of a personal history on the basis of contingency.

The child's consciousness is different from the adult's both in content and organization. Children are not, as previously thought, 'miniature adults.' Thus, contrary to the negative account, the child's consciousness is not identical to the adult's in everything except for its incompleteness and imperfection. The child possess another kind of equilibrium than the adult kind; therefore, we must treat the child's consciousness as a positive phenomenon.

Since perception itself is never complete, since ?ur perspectives give us a world to express and think about which envelopes and exceeds those perspectives, a world which announces itself in lightning signs as a spoken word or as an arabesque, why should the expression of the world be subjected to the prose of the senses or of the concept? It must be poetry; that is, it must completely awaken ?nd recall our sheer power of expressing beyond things already said or seen.

There is an atheism in Christianity, religion of God made man, where Christ dies, abandoned by God.

Human existence is the change of contingency into necessity through the act of taking up. All that we are, we are on the basis of a factual situation that we make our own and that we ceaselessly transform through a sort of escape which is never an unconditioned freedom.

All zoology assumes from our side a methodical Einfühlung into animal behavior, with the participation of the animal in our perceptive life and the participation of our perceptive life in animality.