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The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

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
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Insane Mission Remove
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Expression Facial Live Myself
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

Body Oneself Perception Relation Talk
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Certain Essence Establishment Reservation
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

Himself Natural Perception State Thinking Truth World
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

Definition Function Imagination Man Object Reality Rich
My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Myself Teaching Thinking Word
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Determination Open Start World
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
Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

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

Experience Intellectual Ourselves
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 child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Believe Children Hesitate Live World
I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Language Live Myself Talk