Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have in it more genuine humanity.

There is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another.

Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.

What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light.

Faith--in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified-enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal with the existing world. Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustibJe and our information limited.

Evolution, life, physis, appear here as enveloping with regard to 'consciousness' of human knowledge.

Language realizes, by breaking the silence, what the silence wished and did not obtain.

Nature gives us a dispersed finality. It is a demonology, full of supranatural forces, not one of which is supernatural. On this terrain of knowledge, one must be polytheist.

We are already in the being thus described, that we are of it, that between it and us there is Einfühlung. That means that my body is made of the same flesh as the world, and moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation of mutual transgression or of overlapping.

What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference.

No one is fully saved, and no one is fully lost.

One cannot even say that one believes in the perception of the real. Belief only intervenes after a preexisting doubt, and thus it is the imaginary that we truly believe in, because our beliefs lack some support. I do not believe in this chair I see: the chair is simply there, that is all. Perception does not await proof in order to grasp an object; it is prior to careful observation. In this sense, perception, like the imagination, precedes all premises.

The subject is not so much the intelligent subject as the desiring subject.

The 'invisible world': it is given originally as non-Urprasentierbar, as the other is in his body given originally as absent--as a divergence, as a transcendence.

It is only withln the perceived world that we can understand that ail corporeality is already symbolism.

What is given is the metamorphosis of brute being, the giving birth.

The flesh...The wrapping of a body - object around itself...my body standing in front of the upright things, in a circuit with the world, an empathy with the world, with the things, with the animals, with other bodies...The flesh is the originary presentation of the unpresentable as such, the visibility of the invisible...In this arrangement of flesh, then, there appears or emerges a vision...by the arrangement of a hollow, by the irruption of a new field that comes from the interworld.

The body as the power of empathy is already desire, libido, projection - introjection, identification. The esthesiological structure of the human body is thus a libidinal structure, the perception of a mode of desire, a relation of being and not of knowledge...What is the I of desire? It is obviously the body,

We would speak of nothing if it were only necessary to speak of that with which we coincide, since speech is already a separation. Moreover, there is no experience without speech, the purely lived is not even found within man's speaking life. But the primary sense of speech is, nevertheless, in this text of experience that it attempts to utter.

We only know what we are after we have lost it...Such is true nothingness, which is not nichtiges Nicht but Sein.

The world and others become our flesh.

The object of biology is to grasp that which makes a living being a living being, that is, not--according to the realist postulate common to both mechanism and vitalism--the superposition of elementary reflexes or the intervention of a 'vital force,' but an indecomposable structure of behavior. It is by means of ordered reactions that we can understand the automatic reactions as degradations. Just as anatomy refers back to physiology, physiology refers back to biology.

The body is the seat of a certain praxis, the point from which there is something to do in the world, the register in which we are inscribed and whose inscription we continue.

The reduction no longer involves a return to ideal being, but brings us back to the spirit of Heraclitus, to an interweaving of horizons, to an open Being.