Quote

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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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
Instruments
Things
Objects
Like
Move
Hand
Inhabits
Space
Haunts
Wish
Applies
Moving
Instrument
Hands
Object

More quotes by 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 body is our general medium for having a world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
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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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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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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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
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We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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The flesh is at the heart of the world.
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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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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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
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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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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I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
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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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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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty