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

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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 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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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.
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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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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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.
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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 world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
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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 flesh is at the heart of the world.
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It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
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.
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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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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty