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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

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

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.

Empathy, Expression, Expressions, Facial, Feels, Living

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.

Surprise, Take, Teach, Thinking, Words

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

Discover, Expression, Thinking, Vision, World

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

Silence, Thread, Tissue, Tissues, Woven

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

Mean, Men, Service, Truth, Usage, Views

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

I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it. . . If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one's own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.

Body, Perception, Say, Speak

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

Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.

Circles, Fabric, Moving, Sees, Things, World

Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

Consciousness, Human, Montaigne, Self, Understanding

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.

Act, Art, Philosophy, Reflection, Truth

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

Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.

Finds, Language, Material, Phenomenology, Sides, Writer

Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.

Displaces, Doe, Philosophy, Sacred, Thing, Thinking

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

Meaning, Name, Names, Phenomenology, Say Anything, World

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

Language, Languages, Live, May, Speak

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

Flesh, Heart, World

As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions.

Believe, Humanity, Nobody, Opinions, Relationships, Thinking

The world is. . . the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

Fields, Natural, Perception, Setting, World

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