The World of Perception Quotes

“Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dispute here) but also when it comes to happiness.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes' famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intellect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“Rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“In modernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion. There is no knowing, moreover, whether a conclusion will ever be added.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“Being is not given but rather emerges over time.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“It is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing...Form and content – what is said and the way in which it is said – cannot exist separately from one another.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“Courage consists in being reliant on oneself and others to the extent that, irrespective of differences in physical and social circumstance, all manifest in their behaviour and their relationships that very same spark which makes us recognise them, which makes us crave their assent or their criticism, the spark which means we share a common fate.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of being myself, which allows me to not have an opinion; there is no ‘inner’ life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people. Reason does not lie behind us, nor is that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inherited. Yet we are no more able to reach them definitively than we are to give up on them.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“Imagine that I am in the presence of someone
who, for one reason or another, is extremely annoyed with me. My interlocutor gets angry and I notice that he is expressing his anger by speaking aggressively, by gesticulating and shouting. But where is this anger? People will say that it is in the
mind of my interlocutor. What this means is not entirely clear. For I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I discern in my opponent’s looks separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this takes place in some otherworldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man. It really is here, in this room and in this part of the room, that the anger breaks forth...Anger inhabits him and it blossoms on the surface of his pale or purple cheeks, his blood-shot eyes and wheezing
voice. And if, for one moment, I step out of my own viewpoint as an external observer of this anger and try to remember what it is like for me when I am angry, I am forced to admit that it is no different. When I reflect on my own anger, I do not come across any element that might be separated or, so to speak, unstuck, from my own body. When I
recall being angry at Paul, it does not strike me that this anger was in my mind or among my thoughts but rather, that it lay entirely between me who was doing the shouting and that odious Paul who just sat there calmly and listened with an ironic air. My anger is nothing less than an attempt to destroy Paul, one which will remain verbal if I am a pacifist and even
courteous, if I am polite. The location of my anger, however, is in the space we both share – in which we exchange arguments instead of blows – and not in me.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“The 'normal' person must remain open to these abnormalities of which he is never entirely exempt himself; he must take the trouble to understand them. He is invited to look at himself without
indulgence, to rediscover within himself the whole host of fantasies, dreams, patterns of magical behaviour and obscure phenomena which remain all-powerful in shaping both his private and public life and his relationships with other people. These leave his knowledge of the natural world riddled with
gaps, which is how poetry creeps in.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“We are rediscovering in every object a certain style of being that makes it a mirror of human modes of behaviour. So the way we relate to the things of the
world is no longer as a pure intellect trying to master an object or space that stands before it. Rather, this relationship is an ambiguous one, between beings who are both embodied and limited and an enigmatic world of which we catch a glimpse (indeed which we haunt incessantly) but only ever from points of view that hide as much as they reveal, a world in which
every object displays the human face it acquires in a
human gaze.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“The things of the world are not simply neutral objects which stand before us for our contemplation. Each one of them symbolises or recalls a particular way of behaving, provoking in us reactions which are either favourable or unfavourable. This is why people’s tastes, character, and the attitude they
adopt to the world and to particular things can be deciphered from the objects with which they choose to surround themselves, their preferences for certain colours or the places where they like to go for walks...The objects which haunt our dreams are meaningful in the same way. Our relationship with things is not a distant one: each speaks to our body and to the way we live. They are clothed in human characteristics (whether docile, soft, hostile or resistant) and conversely they dwell within us as emblems of forms of life we either love or hate.
Humanity is invested in the things of the world and these areninvested in it. To use the language of psychoanalysis, things are complexes. This is what Cézanne meant when he spoke of the particular ‘halo’ of things which it is the task of painting to
capture.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“The unity of the object will remain a mystery for as long as we think of its various qualities (its colour and taste, for example) as just so many data belonging to the entirely distinct worlds of sight, smell, touch and so on. Yet modern psychology, following Goethe’s lead, has observed that, rather
than being absolutely separate, each of these qualities has an affective meaning which establishes a correspondence between it and the qualities associated with the other senses. For example, anyone who has had to choose carpets for a flat
will know that a particular mood emanates from each colour, making it sad or happy, depressing or fortifying. Because the same is true of sounds and tactile data, it may be said that each colour is the equivalent of a particular sound or temperature. This is why some blind people manage to picture a colour when it is described, by way of an analogy with, for example, a sound.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them: each of its qualities is the whole. Cézanne said that you
should be able to paint the smell of trees.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“We vleien onszelf niet meer met de gedachte dat we een gemeenschap van zuivere geesten zijn. Laten we liever kijken naar de werkelijke relaties tussen de één en de ander in onze samenlevingen die doorgaans bestaan uit meester-slaafverhoudingen.

*(De meester-slaafdialectiek impliceert dat de meester alleen meester kan zijn in relatie tot de slaaf en omgekeerd de slaaf alleen slaaf kan zijn in relatie tot de meester.)

Laten we onszelf niet rechtvaardigen door een beroep te doen op onze goede intenties, maar laten we kijken wat er met deze intenties gebeurt op het moment dat zij een eigen leven zijn gaan leiden. Deze uitwendige blik die we op onze eigen soort kunnen hebben, kan heel verhelderend zijn.

(...)

De mens van buitenaf zien is een vorm van kritiek en duidt op de gezondheid van de geest. Deze is niet bedoeld om te suggereren dat alles absurd is zoals Voltaire deed, maar veeleer om te suggereren, zoals Kafka deed, dat het menselijke leven altijd wordt bedreigd en om ons, door middel van humor, vertrouwd te maken met de zeldzame en kostbare momenten waarin het de mensen overkomt dat zij zichzelf herkennen en terugvinden.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“De mensheid bestaat in beginsel als een onstabiele situatie: ieder persoon kan slechts datgene geloven wat zij in haar binnenste als waar herkent, maar tegelijkertijd denkt en beslist ieder persoon slechts omdat zij is opgenomen in bepaalde verbanden met de ander waardoor zij bij voorkeur in de richting van dit soort gedeelde meningen wordt gestuurd.

Een ieder is alleen en niemand kan zich in een ander verplaatsen (...)

Er bestaat geen leven in meervoud dat ons zou bevrijden van de last van onszelf, dat ons zou vrijspreken van het hebben van een eigen mening. Er bestaat echter ook geen 'inwendig' leven dat los zou staan van een eerste poging een relatie aan te gaan met de ander.

In deze ambigue situatie, waarin we zijn geworpen omdat we een lichaam en een persoonlijke en collectieve geschiedenis hebben, kunnen we nooit absolute rust vinden. We moeten onophoudelijk werken aan het verminderen van onze onderlinge verschillen, aan het uitleggen van onze woorden die verkeerd zijn begrepen, aan het demonstreren van onze verborgen kanten, aan het waarnemen van de ander.

We kunnen de rede en de overeenstemming van de geesten niet op een definitieve wijze bereiken, maar evenmin zijn we in staat ze op te geven.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

“Een baby van een aantal maanden oud is al heel bedreven in het onderscheiden van vriendelijkheid, kwaadheid en angst op het gezicht van de ander, ook al heeft het kind op dat moment nog niet geleerd, door een onderzoek van het eigen lichaam, wat de fysieke tekens van deze emoties zijn. Het lichaam van de ander met zijn verschillende gebaren en uitingen verschijnt direct als een met emotie geïnvesteerde betekenis aan het kind. Het kind leert de geest dus zowel te begrijpen als een zichtbaar gedrag en als datgene wat zich afspeelt in de intimiteit van zijn eigen geest. Op onze beurt ontdekken wij, volwassenen, in ons eigen leven alleen datgene wat onze cultuur, boeken, traditie en ons onderwijs ons geleerd hebben daarin te zien.

(...)

Het zuivere 'zich' - de geest zonder lichaam, zonder instrumenten en geschiedenis - dat we als een kritische instantie kunnen plaatsen tegenover de zuivere en eenvoudige binnendringing van ideeën, die ons worden opgedrongen door onze leefomgeving, kan zichzelf uiteindelijk alleen realiseren in een tastbare vrijheid die zich baseert op het instrument van de taal en op de deelname aan het aardse leven.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception