The Merleau-Ponty Reader Quotes

“Philosophy is not a hospital. If people are vertiginous and want to take medication against it, I don't stop them, but I say: this is medication.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“While listening to a piece of beautiful music: impressions that this movement which is beginning is already at its end, that it is going to have been, or sinking into the future that we hold as well as the past—though we cannot say exactly what it will be. Anticipated Retrospection—retrograde movement in futuro: it is descending toward me already made.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“The specular thing-image, or thing-'mental image' chiasm: imagination inherent to each subfield of this sense. The imaginary deploys itself in this field—which is therefore carnal.
The imaginary: decentering of the sensible.
The concept: decentering of the imaginary.
Me-world Chiasm: the things gaze upon me. I gaze upon myself (through the eyes of the things).
The chiasm is the idea of Being as the elevation of the relative to the Absolute by means of the diaphragm and the 'there is.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“Ontology is everywhere—in the painter’s articulation of the world, in the scientist’s flashes of insight drawn from things, in the passions, in the modes of labor and sociality. There is an ontological history, a deployment of our relation with being, or a modulation of the relation of being to nothingness. This ontological history is not outside 'history'; it might even be the most rigorous formula of 'history'; it is the truth of dialectical materialism.

Marx’s error is not that he attempted a philosophical reading of history; it is to have believed or to let be believed that the philosophy of philosophers was a lie. His error is not that he thought that history is undivided, body and mind, but to have believed or to let be believed that the mixture was headed toward noncontradiction or identity. His error is not that he believed that every civilization is an ontological complex, but to have believed that a civilization was being prepared that would take the place of ontology. There is no 'destruction' of philosophy which could be
its 'realization.' To postulate such a state of history is precisely to do bad philosophy, to make an ontology without depth or a 'flat' ontology, as Hegel said.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“Very few philosophers have been anarchists. Nearly all of them admit that a State and a power are necessary. They do not wash their hands of it, and yet they do not consent to the myth. Or, when they do, they nonetheless give warning that it is a myth. This
is the source of their uneasiness. It is not an anomaly or an aristocratic malady.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“One does not write solely for oneself, or solely for truth, but not simply for others either. One writes. That is all, and in doing so one aims at all of that at once. Those who write imply that all of this can happen in the same movement.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“The truth of a social system lies in the type of
human relations it makes possible.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“Social psychology can degenerate into a means of governing and an apparatus of conservation as soon as it posits as natural existing social relations, as normal the integration of the individual into these relations, and explains the difficulties it encounters through the failings of a private order. It is then that all revolt is neurosis and that the social engineers work to make the subjugated accept their condition, to transform, in the service of the 'normal,' the energies freed by social disintegration into a force of conservatism. At this point we see the appearance of a new form of propaganda, a 'propaganda through truth.' A false democracy begins to emerge, a 'statistical democracy,' which is to say the seductive dictatorship of the 'normal,' the superficial, and the conventional. Objectivity becomes the most profound of ruses. The oppressor assures for himself a certain complicity on the part of the oppressed by making them accept an image of themselves that, even if it is flattering, maintains them in their difference. Social consciousness does not demand that we eliminate psychology, but that we go further than it, in the direction that should be its own. If Americans seek in psychoanalysis the means to satisfy a fascination with the 'normal,' that is not the fault of psychoanalysis, which has done more than any other research to go beyond the notion of a statistical norm. Against a superficial psychoanalysis, we can have recourse only to true psychoanalysis.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“The explanation by the genital, or even by the sexual, does not finish off the problems: for the pleasure states refer to the desire, and the desire is not the prevision or search of a pleasure state, it is intentionality, i.e., blind recognition, i.e., transcendence (for example, the unique Erfüllung which is, Husserl says, sought for by the two bodies, can be unique only by being, not similar here and there, but dasselbe, i.e., on the condition of not being ideally identical, but the same at a distance)...

The 'explanation' explains nothing: what explains put us in the presence of the enigma, which is always the same: how and why is there Eros, that is, a relation of something which is to something which has to be, 'divergence.' The 'genital' and even the 'sexual' exist because they are the flesh (that is, not a 'phenomenon' or a 'phenomenal body,' but a being with two facets, which is what it is and also what it is not and has to be, an openness, a 'light' in the sense that we speak of 'lighting' the canon. If you like a 'for itself' (eine Art der Reflexion) but which is also a for others, a gaze but which is also gazed upon and therefore relation to a being in proximity.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“Transcendence means nothing outside of the notion of the 'flesh.' With the notion of the flesh, mean: there is an explosion toward the world or being. I participate in this explosion like other human bodies. This explosion is not made 'in me,' but in front of me. It is like a fuse held in front of my objective body, which the body lights itself, but which is not one of its properties: I am, along with my body, only the one who lights this conflagration.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“Subjectivity is truly no one. It is truly the desert. What is constitutive of the subject is to be integrally with the things, with the world, to have no positively assignable interior, to be generality. Subjectivity is this foam at the mouth of the world, that the world never dissipates. This is where we find the truth of what Sartre says about nothingness. But what we thus say about subjectivity as nothingness must be immediately translated: therefore there is nothing to say about that, that is not, this nothingness is not, and the negation of this nothingness, the negintuition of this nothingness is not a beginning in one part of philosophy, to which we could then add a counterpart or a complement of facticity. The desert of subjectivity, this notion is one with that of object-Being. And the two notions are both thrown back precisely through the acknowledgment of nothingness as nichtiges Nichts. That of which it is suitable to speak, that which is, is the vertical, non-projective world, and it is the seeing, speaking subject—thinking only on the basis of these operations.This subject is not consciousness, nor Ichheit, not even as 'pure' negativities, it is Speech and Experience, and correlatively, Being is not a distance that I extend, but a distance of transgression, of encroachment and overcoming, and this being surrounds me, and at the limit all my thoughts participate in it. The true nothingness, the nothingness that is true, is Being as distant and as non-hidden (that is, also hidden).”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“This idea of “elements”—not only elements of nature, but elements of our life...apply this idea to the new analysis of subjectivity: immense mistake to consider it as flux of Erlebnisse. Subjectivity is first of all a field, and even its temporality has this structure. Absurdity to conceive it as a punctual present and the indefinite series of punctual-individual Erlebnisse which would be the past.For example, these sculptures remind me of beautiful rocks—one day when someone was showing me, with a sort of fervor which surprised me, some rocks, and gave me some of them, not without some hesitation. I don’t specify the memory or the place and it remains in doubt: it seems to me...Now this 'memory' is not an individual Erlebnis joined back through retention of retention in its singularity. Nor by 'association.' It is:

1. a category, an existential [connected], it is truly deposited in this sculpture that I am seeing, as a certain call is deposited in the three trees of Martinville.
2. An element therefore in the sense of water, of air, etc., that is, not an object or an individual, but a mode of sensing. The memory as a reference to a Zeitpunkt is to be understood as a limit case of these matrixes. There is no Zeitpunkt, no more than there is a spatial point. There are only spots, temporal as well as spatial, i.e., beings of transcendence. And the one who understands these beings of transcendence is a field and not 'representation' at all.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“Someone will say: you explain nothing, you observe. But to explain is always: to bring Nature back to God or to bring it back to the spectacle of man—not to see nature. In reality, what one has to learn is that being is that,it is precisely not to explain.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“For me, philosophy consists in giving another
name to what has long been crystallized under the name of God.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader

“It seems that, by definition, there could be no consciousness of ambiguity without ambiguity of consciousness. This is not a play on words. At the moment when you admit that consciousness of ambiguity is perfectly clear, then the ambiguity is there like this notebook with consciousness in front of it, the consciousness perfectly clear and the ambiguity perfectly ambiguous—then, there is no consciousness of ambiguity. You see the ambiguity as an omnipotent thought would see it. To you, it is no longer ambiguity.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader