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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

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Experience Intellectual Ourselves
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
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Existence Foundation Value World
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Expression Facial Live Myself
My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Myself Teaching Thinking Word
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Language Talk Transcend
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Explanation Obscure
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 body is our general medium for having a world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Body Medium World
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
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

Criticism History Introduction Limitation Ourselves Philosophy
Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Acceptance Religion Reminder Understand
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 flesh is at the heart of the world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Heart World
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
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