Quote

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.

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
Reality
Imaginary
Termed
Doe
Defined
Precede
Object
Surpasses
Must
Function
Precedes
Always
Except
Richness
Men
Number
Symbolic
Objects
Encounter
Numbers
Encounters
Signifiers

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The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
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The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
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The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
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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 flesh is at the heart of the world.
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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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We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty