Nature Quotes

“A field tends of itself to multiply.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The body is not comprehensible in the actual.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“Visible being is natural...But language, art, history gravitate around the invisible (ideality).”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The origin of language is mythic; that is, there is always a language before language, which is perception.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“There is an adherence, a strange kinship between the human and the animal...of the animal as variant of humanity and of humanity as variant of animality.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“An organ of the mobile senses (the eye, the hand) is already a language because it is an interrogation (movement) and a response (perception as fulfillment of a project), speaking and understanding. It is a tacit language...The difference is only relative between a perceptual silence and a language that always carries a thread of silence...Each sign, being a difference with respect to others, and each signification a difference with respect to others, means that the life of language reproduces perceptual structures at another level. We speak in order to fill in the blanks of perception, but words and meanings are not of the absolute positive...The invisible, mind, is not another positivity: it is the inverse, or the other side of the visible.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“Life is not a sort of quasi-interiority, it is only a fold, the reality of a process, as Whitehead would say, in observable up close.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“Behavior develops 'in a spiral'...Every motor theme of embryonic life can be considered as a theme that will be elaborated at a higher level in postnatal life.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“There is the possible in the organism. The embryo is not simple matter, but matter which refers to the future.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The concept of Nature does not evoke only the residue of what had not been constructed by me, but also a productivity which is not ours, although we can use it--that is, an originary productivity that continues beneath the artificial creations of man. It both partakes of the most ancient, and is something always new.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“Nature is both passive and active, product and productivity, but a productivity that always needs to produce something else (for example, human generation, which ceaselessly repeats without end). There is a double moment of expansion and contraction, which Lowith compared to respiration, which never goes to the end of its movement except in death, and which designates the character of a relative production as always begun again. Nature is beyond the World and on this side of God, and as such, Nature is neither God nor World. It is a producer that is not all-powerful, which does not succeed in ending its production: it is a rotary movement that produces nothing definitive. There is a general 'duplicity' of Nature as necessary as Nature itself is. If productive Nature were withdrawn from the product, it would mean only death.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not an object at all; it is not really set out in front of us. It is our soil — not what is in front of us, facing us, but rather, that which carries us.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The Umwelt is less and less oriented toward a goal and more and more toward the interpretation of symbols.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“This Eros as the logic of an incarnated, dialectical life which refers to itself...is an unconsciousness...What is this me which is not me, this weight, this surplus on this side of that of me which appears to me...? It is sensing itself...dispossession, ek-stasis, participation or identification, incorporation or ejection....a blind, nondifferentiated recognition (of the touching and the touched, of me and my image over there), the zero - degree of difference. The sensed=I don't know and I have always known it. We do not need to know what it is since we see it...To see is to think without thinking.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The corporal schema as incorporation...It can be extended to the things (clothing and corporal schema). It can expel a part of the body. It is thus not made of determined parts, but it is a lacunary being (the corporal schema is the hollow on the inside)--includes accentuated, precise regions, and other vague regions. (The hollow and the vague regions are the point of insertion of imaginary bodies.)...There is an encroachment of corporal schema on each other. The anus at the place of the connection of body-images. Replace our analysis of functions by the topology of the body--and our idea of separated apparatuses by that of the body as defining the rays of the world...There can be an infinity of organizations by all the orifices of the body: anal, phallic.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“Evolution, embryogenesis: The body - object is only a trace--Trace in the mechanical sense: present substitute of a past that no longer is--the trace for us is more than the present effect of the past. It is a survival of the past, an enjambment. The trace and the fossil: ammonite. The living thing is no longer there but it is almost there; we have the negative of it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“It is not true that everything is actual; there is an actuality of the possible as possible, that is, the notion of an outline, the being of becoming actual that is certain possibilities.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“Life has both a fragility and an obstinacy: it will be, if nothing opposes it. Not a hard nucleus of being, but the softness of the flesh...A Being of the in-between, an interbeing...Life is not a separable thing, but an investmemt, a singular point, a hollow in Being, an invariant ontological relief...the establishment of a level around which the divergences begin forming, a kind of being that functions like a vault, statistical being against the random, overcoming by encroachment, ambiguity of the part and the whole...thus being by attachment, that we cannot grasp apart, not bring it close (like a hard nucleus), refusal of all or nothing. But life is not negativity: it is a pattern of negations, a system of opposition that means that what is not this, is that, field, dimension--dimension=the depth for flat beings...But the opening is not an opening to everything. It is a specified opening of dimension...Life=being by sketch or outline, that is, territories, regions=inherence in increasingly more precise places in a field of action or a radiation of being.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“Freud truly saw with projection - introjection and sadomasochism the relation of the intertwining of ego and world, of ego and nature, of ego and animality, of ego and socius.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“True nothingness is not the nothing that noths, but a something always on the horizon,the positive determinations of which are the trace and absence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The body is a sensible thing, the movements of which form a...diacritical system...this system is the keystone of the world, or inversely, has the keystone in the world and opens onto the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The world and others become our flesh.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The body as the power of empathy is already desire, libido, projection - introjection, identification. The esthesiological structure of the human body is thus a libidinal structure, the perception of a mode of desire, a relation of being and not of knowledge...What is the I of desire? It is obviously the body,”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The flesh...The wrapping of a body - object around itself...my body standing in front of the upright things, in a circuit with the world, an empathy with the world, with the things, with the animals, with other bodies...The flesh is the originary presentation of the unpresentable as such, the visibility of the invisible...In this arrangement of flesh, then, there appears or emerges a vision...by the arrangement of a hollow, by the irruption of a new field that comes from the interworld.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“In between the microscopic facts, global reality is delineated like a watermark, never graspable for objectivizing-particularizing thinking, never eliminate from or reducible to the microscopic: we had only a bit of protoplasmic jelly, and we then have an embryo, by a transformation which, always too early or too late, we were never witness to in our investment in a biological field.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The nature in us must have some relation to Nature outside of us; moreover, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to us by the Nature that we are.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The instinct is an activity established from within but that possesses a blindness and does not know its object. And so the starling, without ever having presented such a behavior, nor even having seen it in a fellow creature, presents the whole development of the hunt for flies, even though there was absolutely no fly in its surrounding. Perched on a statue, it observes the sky and suddenly it has the attitude characteristic of its species at the moment when the prey is in view. Its eyes and head follow the prey which does not exist, then it takes off, makes the snapping gesture, and strikes the (nonexistent) herbivore with its beak to kill it; it makes a movement of ingestion, then shakes as if it were satisfied. This instinct is not accomplished in view of an end, it is an activity for pleasure...Thus a sort of reference to the non-actual, an oneiric life, is manifested in these instinctive activities in activity pure state. Even if these acts are produced most of the time by reference to an object, they are something altogether different from reference to an object, i.e., they are the manifestation of a certain style...The trigger acts only by actualizing a certain style of behavior. It is not the cause, but is evocative of an innate complex...Here action is the anticipation of a possible situation...Instinct is before all else a theme, a style that meets up with that which evokes it in the milieu, but which does not have goals; it is an activity for pleasure.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“The study of the appearance of animals takes on interest when we understand this appearance as a language. We must grasp the mystery of life in the way that animals show themselves to each other...There is a specular relation between animals: each is the mirror of the other...What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality...The identity of that which sees and that which it sees appears to be an ingredient of animality.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France

“We must define 'organism' as everything that has defined norms, an a priori that governs what happens.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France