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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

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 photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Close Destroy Instant Open Photograph Time
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 world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Natural Perception Thinking 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
The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Meaning World
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
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
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

Atheist Definition Join Place Thinking Touch Word
We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Dimension Discover Existence Natural Object World
We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Silence Thread Tissue
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
The flesh is at the heart of the world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Heart World
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

Alone Happiness People
My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Myself Teaching Thinking Word
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

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

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

Experience Intellectual Ourselves
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
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 live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Expression Facial Live Myself
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Existence Foundation Value World
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

End Man Meaning Rule Service Talk
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Certain Essence Establishment Reservation
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
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