Sense and Non-Sense Quotes

“A science without philosophy would literally not know what it was talking about. A philosophy without methodological exploration of phenomena would end up with nothing but formal truths, which is to say, errors.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“From the moment we do something, we turn toward the world, stop self-questioning, and go beyond ourselves in our action. Faith--in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified--enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal
with the existing world. Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustible and our information limited.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“Cézanne did not think be had to choose between feeling and thought, between order and chaos. He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization...He wanted to put intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspective, and tradition back in touch with the world of nature which they must cornprehend. He wished, as be said, to confront the sciences with the nature 'from which they came.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“To say "Hell is other people" does not mean "Heaven is me." If other people are the instruments of our torture, it is first and foremost because they are
indispensable to our salvation. We are so intermingled with them that we must make what order we can out of this chaos.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in "stories" and, as it were, pointed at.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“Phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its "conditions of possibility," but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“The lived object is not rediscovered or constructed on the basis of the contributions of the senses; rather, it presents itself to us from the start as the center from which these contributions radiate. We
see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects; Cézanne even claimed that we see their odor. If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must carry with it this
indivisible whole, or else his picture will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the insurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real...Expressing what exists is an endless task.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become. It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously, as well as the way freedom dawns in us without breaking our bonds with the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“The Incarnation changes everything...The meaning of the Pentecost is that the religion of both the Father and the Son are to be fulfilled in the religion of the Spirit, that God is no longer in Heaven but in human society and communication, wherever men come together in His name. Christ's stay on earth was only the beginning of his presence...

The ambiguity of Christianity on the political plane is perfectly comprehensible: when it remains true to the Incarnation, it can be revolutionary, but the religion of the Father is conservative...Claudel and Jacques Rivière were right in saying that the Christian is a nuisance to the Establishment because he is always somewhere else and one can never be sure of him. But the Christian makes revolutionaries uneasy for the very same reason: they feel he is never completely with them. He is a poor conservative and an unsafe bet as a revolutionary. There is just one case where the Church itself calls for insurrection: when a legal power violates divine law. But one has never
in fact seen the Church take a stand against a legal government for the simple reason that it was unjust or back a revolution simply because it was just. On the contrary, it has been seen to favor rebels because they protected its tabernacles, its ministers, and its property. God will not fully have corne to the earth until the Church feels the same obligation
toward other men as it does toward its own ministers, toward the houses of Guernica as toward its own temples.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“From the moment I recognize that my experience, precisely insofar as it is my own, makes me
accessible to what is not myself, that I am sensitive to the world and to others, all the beings which objective thought placed at a distance draw
singularly nearer to me. Or, conversely, I recognize my affinity with them; I am nothing but an ability to echo them, to understand them, to respond to them. My life seems absolutely individual and absolutely
universal to me. This recognition of an individual life which animates all past and contemporary lives and receives its entire life from them, of a light which flashes from them to us contrary to all hope--this is
metaphysical consciousness, whose first stage is surprise at discovering the confrontation of opposites and whose second stage is recognition of
their identity in the simplicity of doing. Metaphysical consciousness has no other abjects than those of experience: this world, other people, human history, truth, culture. But instead of taking them as ail settled, as consequences with no premises, as if they were self-evident, it rediscovers their fundamental strangeness to me and the miracle of their appearing...Understood in this way, metaphysics is the opposite of system.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“All knowledge of man by man, far from being pure contemplation, is the taking up by each, as best he can, of the acts of others, reactivating from ambiguous signs an experience which is not his own, appropriating a structure (e.g., the a priori of the species, the sublinguistic schema or spirit of a civilization) of which he forms no distinct concept but which he puts together as an experienced pianist
deciphers an unknown piece of music: without himself grasping the motives of each gesture or each operation, without being able to bring to the surface of consciousness all the sediment of knowledge which he is using at that moment. Here we no longer have the positing of an object, but rather we have communication with a way of being. The universality of knowledge is no longer guaranteed in each of us by that stronghold of absolute consciousness in which the Kantian "I think"--although linked to a certain spatio-temporal perspective--was assured a priori of being identical to every other possible "I think." The germ of universality or the "natural light" without which there could be no knowledge is to be found ahead of us, in the thing where our perception
places us, in the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us by means of a movement not all of whose sources are known to us.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“I do not think the world in the act of perception: it organizes itself in front of me.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“The perception of forms, understood very broadly as structure, grouping, or configuration should be considered our spontaneous way of seeing.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“Unlike the natural sciences, psychoanalysis was not meant to give us necessary relations of cause and effect but to point to motivational relationships which are in principle simply possible. We should not take Leonardo's fantasy of the vulture, or the
infantile past which it masks, for a force which determined his future. Rather, it is like the words of the oracle, an ambiguous symbol whlch applies in advance to several possible chains of events. To be more precise: in every life, one's birth and one's past define categories or basic dimensions which do not impose any particular act but which can be found in all. Whether Leonardo yielded to his childhood or whether he wished to flee from it, he could never have been other than he was. The very decisions which transform us are always made in reference to
a factual situation; such a situation can of course be accepted or refused, but it cannot fail to give us our impetus nor to be for us, as a situation "to be accepted" or "to be refused," the incarnation for us
of the value we give to it. If it is the aim of psychoanalysis to describe this exchange between future and past and to show how each life muses over riddles whose final meaning is nowhere written down, then we have no right to demand inductive rigor from it. The psychoanalyst's hermeneutic musing, which multiplies the communications
between us and ourselves, which takes sexuality as the symbol of existence and existence as symbol of sexuality, and which looks in the past for the meaning of the future and in the future for the meaning of the past, is better suited than rigorous induction to the circular movement of our lives, where the future rests on the past, the past on
the future, and where everything symbolizes everything else. Psychoanalysis does not make freedom impossible; it teaches us to think of this
freedom concretely, as a creative repetition of ourselves, always, in retrospect, faithful to ourselves.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“Only one emotion is possible for this painter--the feeling of strangeness--and only one lyricism--that of
the continual rebirth of existence...He speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever
painted before. What he expresses cannot, therefore, be the translation of a clearly defined thought, since such clear thoughts are those which have already been uttered by ourselves or by others. "Conception"
cannot precede "execution." There is nothing but a vague fever before the act of artistic expression, and only the work itself, completed and understood, is proof that there was something rather than nothing to be said. Because he returns to the source of silent and solitary experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas have been built in order to know it, the artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout, whether it can detach itself from the flow of individual life in which it originates and give the independent existence of an identifiable meaning either to the future of that same individual life or to the monads coexisting with it or to the open community of future monads. The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere--not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life. It summons one away from the already constituted reason in which "cultured men" are content to shut themselves, toward a reason which contains its own origins.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense