The Prose of the World Quotes

“The imaginary is lodged in the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“Τα πράγματα που γίνονται αντιληπτά δεν θα ήταν για εμάς αναντίρρητα παρόντα με σάρκα και οστά, εάν δεν ήταν ανεξάντλητα, ποτέ εντελώς δοσμένα, δεν θα φαίνονταν όμοια με την αιωνιότητα την οποία τους αποδίδουμε, εάν δεν προσφέρονταν σε μια εποπτεία, που κανένας χρόνος δεν μπορεί να τερματίσει.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“Meaning is like spots of light surrounded by rugged clouds of night, glowing islands.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“The happy writer and the speaking man are neither so greatly nor so little conscientious. They do not wonder, before speaking, whether speech is possible. They do not contemplate the sorrow of language which is the necessity of not saying everything if one is to say something. They sit happily in the shade of a great tree and continue aloud the internal monologue. Their thought germinates in speech and, without seeking it, they are understood, making themselves other, while saying what is most singular to them. They truly abide in themselves, without feeling exiled from the other. And because they
are fully convinced that what seems evident to them is true, they say it quite simply. They cross bridges of snow without seeing how fragile those are, using to the very limit that extraordinary power given to every mind of convincing others and entering into
their little corner when it believes itself to be coextensive with the truth.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“If the other person is really another, at a certain stage I must be surprised, disoriented. If we are to meet not just through what we have in common but in what is different between us— which presupposes a transformation of myself and of the other
as well—then our differences can no longer be opaque qualities. They must become meaning. In the perception of the other, this happens when the other organism, instead of "behaving" like me, engages with the things in my world in a style that is at first
mysterious to me but which at least seems to me a coherent style because it responds to certain possibilities which fringed the things in my world. Similarly, when I am reading, there must be a certain moment where the author's intention escapes me, where he withdraws himself. Then I catch up from behind, fall into step, or else I turn over a few pages and, a bit later, a happy phrase brings me back and leads me to the core of the new signification, and I find access to it through one of its "aspects" which
was already part of my experience. Rationality, or the agreement of minds, does not require that we all reach the same idea by the same road, or that significations be enclosed in definitions. It requires only that every experience contain points of catch for all other ideas and that "Ideas" have a configuration. This double requirement is the
postulation of a world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“Thus the highest point of truth is still only perspective.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“Truth is not an adequation but anticipation, repetition, and slippage of meaning. Truth allows itself to be reached only through a sort of distance. The thing thought is not the thing perceived. Knowledge is not perception, speech is not one gesture among all the other gestures. For speech is the vehicle of our movement toward truth, as the body is the vehicle of our being in the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“The awareness of truth advances like a crab, turned towardits point of departure, toward that structure whose signification it expresses.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“We are trying to show not that mathematical thought rests upon the sensible but that it is creative...Non-Euclidean geometries contain
Euclid's geometry as a particular case but not the inverse. What is essential to mathematical thought, therefore, lies in the moment where a structure is decentered, opens up to questioning, and reorganizes itself according to a new meaning which is nevertheless the meaning of this same structure. The truth of the result, its value independent of the content, consists in its not involving a change in which the initial relations dissolve, to be replaced by others in which they would be unrecognizable. Rather, the truth lies in a restructuring which, from one end to the other, is known to itself, is congruent with itself, a restructuring which was announced in the vectors of the initial structure by its style, so that each effective change is the fulfillment of an intention, and each anticipation receives from the structure the completion it needed.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“This mute or operational language of perception begins a process of knowledge which it cannot itself accomplish. However firm my perceptive grasp of the world may be, it is entirely dependent upon a centrifugal movement which throws me toward the world. I can recapture my grasp only if I myself spontaneously posit new dimensions of its signification. Here is the beginning of speech, the style of knowledge, truth in the logician's sense. It is called forth from its first movement by perceptual evidence which it continues without being reducible to perceptual evidence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“Every mathematical idea presents itself to us with the character of a construction after the fact, a reconquest. Cultural constructions never have the solidity of natural objects. They are never there in the same way. Each morning, after night has intervened, we must make contact with them again. They remain impalpable; they float in the air of the village but the countryside does contain them. If, nevertheless, in the fullness of thought, the truths of culture seem to us the measure of being, and if so many philosophies posit the world upon them, it is because knowledge continues upon the thrust of perception. It is because knowledge uses the world-thesis which is its fundamental sound. We believe truth is eternal because truth expresses the perceived world and perception implies a world which was functioning before it and according to principles which it discovers and does not posit. In one and the same movement knowledge roots itself in perception and distinguishes itself from perception. Knowledge is an effort to recapture, to internalize, truly to possess a meaning that escapes perception at the very moment that it takes shape there, because it is interested only in the echo that
being draws from itself, not in this resonator, its own other which makes the echo possible. Perception opens us to a world already constituted and can only reconstitute it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“Perception, which is an event, opens onto the thing perceived, which appeared to be prior to perception and to be true before it. And if perception always reaffirms the preexistence of the world, it is precisely because it is an event, because the subject who perceives is already at grips with being through the perceptual fields, the "senses.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“There are eyes at the tips of my fingers.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“I cut straight through the scribbling to the book, because I have built up in myself a strange expressive organism which can not only interpret the conventional meaning of the book's words and techniques but can even allow itself to be transformed and endowed with new organs by the book.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“I am receiving and giving in the same gesture.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“I bring the match near, I light a flimsy piece of paper, and, behold, my gesture receives inspired help from the things around, as if the chimney and the dry wood had been waiting for me to set the light, or as though the match had been nothing but a magic incantation, a call of like to like answered beyond all
imagination.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning—sedimented language and speech.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“An expression and what it expresses strangely alternate and, through a sort of false recognition, make us feel that the word has inhabited the thing from all eternity...One of the effects of language is to efface itself to the extent that its expression comes across.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“Tlie algorithm, the project of a universal language, is a revolt against language in its existing state and a refusal to depend upon the confusions of everyday language.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“The study that I made of the whirlwind of language, of the other as a force drawing me toward a meaning, applies in the first place to the whirlwind of the other drawing me toward himself. It is not simply that I am fixed by the other, that he is the X by whom I am seen, frozen. He is the person spoken to, i.e., an offshoot of myself, outside, my double, my twin, because I make him do everything that I do and he makes me do the same. It is true that language is founded, as Sartre says, but not on an apperception; it is founded on the phenomenon of the mirror, ego-alter ego, or of the echo, in other words, of a carnal generality: what warms me, warms him; it is founded on the magical action of like upon like (the warm sun makes me warm), on the fusion of me embodied—and the world. This foundation does not prevent language from coming back dialectically over what preceded it and transforming the purely carnal and vital coexistence with the world and bodies into a coexistence of language.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“When I am listening, it is not necessary that I have an auditory perception of the articulated sounds but that the conversation pronounces itself within me. It summons me and grips me; it envelops and inhabits me to the point that I cannot tell what comes from me and what from it. Whether speaking or listening, I project myself into the other person, I introduce him into my own self.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“Rather than imprisoning it, language is like a magic machine for transporting the 'I' into the other person's perspective.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“Philosophy is not the passage from a confused world to a universe of closed significations. On the contrary, philosophy begins with the awareness of a world which consumes and destroys our established significations but also renews and purifies them.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“I create Stendhal; I am Stendhal while reading him. But that is because first he knew how to bring me to dwell within him. The reader's sovereignty is only imaginary, since he draws all his force from that infernal machine called the book, the apparatus for making significations. The relations between the reader and the book are like those loves in which one partner initially dominates because he was more proud or more temperamental, and then the situation changes and the other, more wise and more silent, rules. The expressive moment occurs where the relationship reverses itself, where the book takes possession of the reader.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

“We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World