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 PONTYThe world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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The body is our general medium for having a world.
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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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Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
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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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Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.
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Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
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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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We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
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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.
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The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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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.
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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
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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.
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The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
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Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY