This swarming of words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts – this universal substitution is also a kind of stability.
maurice Merleau-pontyquotes
1908 - 1961
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), French philosopher and professor, described his life as having two distinct phases. The first phase was his effort to restore the world of perception, so that the body was no longer viewed as merely an object or material entity. He illustrated his point in Phenomenology of Perception, which is considered one of his greatest contributions to technical philosophy. Perception, Merleau-Ponty claims, is not passive but a “creative receptivity.”
The second phase, as Merleau-Ponty stated, was an attempt to show that communication with others goes far beyond the realm of perception. He found empiricism and rationalism unsatisfactory philosophical traditions to describe his views on perception though, so he turned, for a time, toward social and political topics. He published numerous Marxists essays (Humanism and Terror) in defense of soviet communism.
After the Korean War however, his strong stance faltered and he viewed Marxism no longer as the final word, but simply as a model for understanding oneself and history. His disillusionment with Marxism led to a falling out with long-time friend, Jean-Paul Sartre.
As Merleau-Ponty was heavily influenced by both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, he is often associated with the Existentialist movement, even though his later philosophies seem to take a turn from that theory. While not one of the most acclaimed philosophers of his day, Merleau-Ponty is considered a relevant and valuable resource to European philosophy, and his arguments are being given more attention now, especially within the cognitive sciences and medical ethics spheres of study.
The swimmer unknowingly skims over a whole buried universe which would frighten him if he looked at it with undersea goggles.
If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that ‘one’ perceives in me, and not that I perceive.
We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakeably.
Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it demands.
There is no sphere of immanence, no realm in which my consciousness is fully at home and secure against all risk of error.
Production: not a tree, but bushes of several roots mixed together.
The whole architecture of the notions of psychology… as differentiations of one sole and massive adhesion to being which is the flesh …There is no hierarchy of orders of layers or planes, there is dimensionality of every fact & facticity of every dimension.
Is this the highest point of reason, to realize that the soil beneath our feet is shifting, to pompously name ‘interrogation’ what is only a persistent state of stupor, to call ‘research’ or ‘quest’ what is only trudging in a circle, to call ‘Being’ that which never fully is?
There is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place, and which is not simply nothing, even though it cannot be conveyed by a description.