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The body is our general medium for having a world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Age: 53 †
Born: 1908
Born: March 14
Died: 1961
Died: May 3
Aesthetician
Art Theorist
Philosopher
Professor
Rochefort-sur-Mer
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty
Body
World
Phenomenology
Medium
Mediums
General

More quotes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful... but also when it comes to happiness.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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The flesh is at the heart of the world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance - and the body is our anchorage in the world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty