The Visible and the Invisible Quotes

“The flesh is at the heart of the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“...the real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent...”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“We situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, and at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize in what it sees the 'other side' of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. It is a self, not a transparency, like thought, which never thinks anything except by assimilating it, constituting it, transforming it into thought-- but a self by confusion, narcissism, inherence of the seer in the seen, the toucher in the touched, the feeler in the felt -- a self, then, that is caught up in things, having a front and a back, a past and a future.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar which is presented to me as such within the world--one cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual focus, it is inscribed within it (in filigree).”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The color is yet another variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attracts it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of
the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées. A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world—less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of
visibility. Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“Philosophy is not science, because science believes it can soar over its object and holds the correlation of knowledge with being as established, whereas philosophy is the set of questions wherein he who questions is himself implicated by the question. But a physics that has learned to situate the physicist physically, a psychology that has learned to situate
the psychologist in the socio-historical world, have lost the illusion of the absolute view from above: they do not only tolerate, they enjoin a radical examination of our belongingness to the world before all science.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“What is Philosophy? The domain of the Verborgen (philosophy and occultism).”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“Language realizes, by breaking the silence, what the silence wished and did not obtain.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“Perhaps "reality" does not belong definitively to any particular perception, that in this sense it lies always further on; but this does not authorize me to break or to ignore the bond that joins them one after the
other to the real, a bond that cannot be broken with the one without first having been established with the following...Each perception is mutable and only probable—it is, if one likes, only an opinion; but what
is not opinion, what each perception, even if false, verifies, is the belongingness of each experience to the same world, their equal power to manifest it, as possibilities of the same world...And this is why the very fragility of a perception, attested by its breakup and by the substitution of another perception, far from authorizing us to efface the index of "reality" from them all, obliges us to concede it to all of them, to recognize all of them to be variants of the same world, and finally to consider them not as all false but as "all true," not as repeated failures in the determination of the world but as progressive approximations...It is the prepossession of a
totality which is there before one knows how and why, whose realizations are never what we would have imagined them to be, and which nonetheless fulfills a secret expectation within us, since we believe in it tirelessly.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“For us the essential is to know precisely what the being of the world means. Here we must presuppose nothing—neither the naïve idea of being in itself, therefore, nor the correlative idea of a being of representation, of a being for the consciousness, of
a being for man: these, along with the being of the world, are all notions that we have to rethink with regard to our experience of the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“There is vision, touch, when a certain visible, a certain tangible, turns back upon the whole of the visible, the whole of the tangible, of which it is a part, or when suddenly it finds itself surrounded by them, or when between it and them, and through them it forms a Visibility, a Tangible in itself, which belong properly neither to the body qua fact nor the world qua fact--as upon two mirrors facing one another where two indefinite series of images set in one another arise which belong really to neither of the two surfaces, since each is only the rejoinder of the other, and which therefore form a couple, a couple more real than either of them. Thus since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally my passivity--which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, aliemated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer knows which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility, this generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity innate to Myself that we have previously called flesh, and one knows there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with “word-meanings”, it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and its depth.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“L'Être est ce qui exige de nous création pour que nous en ayons l'expérience.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The Freudian idea of the unconscious and the past as 'indestructible,' as 'intemporal' = elimination of the common idea of time as a 'series of Erlebnisse' -- There is an architectonic past, cf. Proust: the true hawthorns are the hawthorns of the past--Restore this life without Erlebnisse, without interiority...which is, in reality, the 'monumental' life, Stiftung, initiation. This 'past' belongs to a mythical time, to the time before time, to the prior life...And in fact here it is indeed the past that adheres to the present and not the consciousness of the past that adheres to the consciousness of the present...It is necessary to take as primary, not the consciousness and its Ablaufsphanomen with its distinct intentional threads, but the vortex which this Ablaufsphanomen schematizes, the spatializing-temporalizing vortex (which is flesh and not consciousness facing a noema).”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“We never have before us pure individuals, indivisible glaciers of beings, nor essences without place and without date. Not that they exist elsewhere, beyond our grasp, but because we are experiences, that is, thoughts that feel behind themselves the weight of the space, the time, the very Being they think, and which therefore do not hold under their gaze a serial space and time nor the pure idea of series, but have about themselves a time and a space that exist by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity—a perpetual pregnancy, perpetual parturition, generativity and generality, brute essence and brute existence, which are the nodes and antinodes of the same ontological vibration.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The visible has to be described as something that is realized through man, but which is nowise anthropology. Nature as the other side of man (as flesh--nowise as 'matter'). Logos also as what is realized in man, but nowise as his property.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“Reversibility is not an actual identity of the touching and the touched. It is their identity by principle (always abortive)...In other words, the fabric of possibilities that closes the exterior visible in upon the seeing body maintains between them a certain divergence (ecart). But this divergence is not a void, it is filled precisely by the flesh as the place of emergence of a vision, a passivity that bears an activity--and so also the divergence between the exterior visible and the body which forms the upholstering of the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The moment that one understands time as chiasm then past and present are Ineinaander, each enveloping-enveloped--and that itself is the flesh.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world an 'ever new' and 'always the same'--A sort of time of sleep. The sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other. Existential eternity. The indestructible, the barbaric Principle. Do a psychoanalysys of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother. A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“Blindness of the 'consciousness': What is does not see it does not see for reasons of principle...What it does not see is what in it prepares the vision of the rest (as the retina is blind at the point where the fibers that will permit the vision spread out into it). What it does not see is what makes it see, is its tie to Being, is its corporeity, are the existentials by which the world becomes visible, is the flesh wherein the object is born. It is inevitable that the consciousness be mystified, inverted, indirect, in principle it sees the things through the other end, in principle it disregards Being and prefers the object to it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The 'associations' of psychoanalysis are in reality 'rays' of time and of the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The invisible is a hollow in the visible, a fold in passivity, not pure production.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“We must accustom ourselves to understand that 'thought' is not an invisible contact of self with self, that it lives outside of this intimacy with oneself, in front of us, not in us, always eccentric. Just as we rediscover the field of the sensible world as interior-exterior, so also it is necessary to rediscover as the reality of the inter-human world and of history a surface of separation between me and the other which is also the place of our union, the unique Erfullung of his life and my life. It is to this surface of separation and of union that the existentials of my personal history proceed, it is the geometrical locus of the projections and introjections, it is the invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of the others turn to rock into one another, the inner framework of intersubjectivity.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The invisible is there without being an object, it is pure transcendence, without an ontic mask. And the 'visibles' themselves, in the last analysis, they too are only centered on a nucleus of absence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“Each field is a dimension, and Being is dimensionality itself.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The positive and the negative are the two 'sides' of a Being; in the vertical world, every being has this structure (To this structure is bound the ambiguity of the consciousness...of imperception in perception...). Against the doctrine of contradiction, absolute negation, the either or--Transcendence is identity within difference.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The essence, likewise, is an inner framework, it is not above the sensible world, it is beneath, or in its depth, its thickness. It is the secret bond...things are Essences at the level of Nature.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible