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Maurice Merleau-Ponty Biography

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (French: [mɔʁis mɛʁlo pɔ̃ti]; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, and politics. He was on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine established by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes

Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual’. There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.

Decision, Determine, Motivation, Totally, Vice, Vices

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

Believe, Communication, Movement, See, Separation

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.

Cured, Hands, Philosophical, Philosophy, Point, Use

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

Forthwith, Metamorphosis, Overlapping, Overtaking, Photograph

Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful. . . but also when it comes to happiness.

Alone, Can Do, Happiness, Nobody, People

[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis

According, Art, Body, Possesses, Sensate, Wish

We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.

Existence, Fields, Object, Permanent, Phenomenology, World

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

Language, Phenomenology, Speak, Transcends

The philosopher will ask himself. . . if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.

Criticism, Limit, Limits, Philosophy, Suggesting

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

Accepting, Opposite, Opposites, Religion, Same, Understand

Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always will be that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general - as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use.

Active, Bold, Gives, Giving Up, Real, Thinking

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

Doe, Make, Order, Translatable, Two, Worlds

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

Existence, Foundation, Value, World

The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary.

Function, Men, Numbers, Precedes, Reality

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

Language, Languages, Live, May, Speak

Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.

Extent, Ignorance, Philosophy, Same, Work, Work Out

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object.

Hands, Haunts, Instrument, Moving, Object, Space

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

Century, Elucidate, Irrational, Missions, Twentieth

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.

Feelings, Giving, Machiavellian, Politician, Trying, Whole

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

Flesh, Heart, World

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