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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

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

Art Existence Expression Philosophy Reflection Truth World
The body is our general medium for having a world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Body Medium World
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Language Material Surround Weave Work Writing
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

Discover Expression Myself Vision World
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Language Talk Transcend
The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Natural Perception Thinking World
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

Body Instrument Move Object Space
The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Meaning World
It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Fortune Greatness Passion Professional
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Circle Fabric Mobile See Visible World
The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Art Body Compare Object Work
The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Believe Children Hesitate Live World
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

Experience Goal Harmony Ourselves Understand World
The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Art Body Interrogate Possession
Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Body Breathe Form Heart Life System Visible World
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

Color Consciousness Division Failure Recognition Separate Sight