Éloge de la philosophie Quotes

“There is no history where the course of events is a series of episodes without unity, or where it is a struggle already decided in the heaven of ideas. History is there where there is a logic within contingence, a reason within unreason, where there
is a historical perception which, like perception in
general, leaves in the background what cannot enter
the foreground but seizes the lines of force as they
are generated and actively leads their traces to a
conclusion. This analogy should not be interpreted
as a shameful organicism or finalism, but as a reference to the fact that all symbolic systems--perception, language, history--only become what they were although in order to do so they need to be
taken up into human initiative.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Le philosophe ne dit pas qu’un dépassement final des contradictions humaines soit possible et que l’homme total nous attende dans l’avenir : comme tout le monde, il n’en sait rien. Il dit, - et c’est tout autre chose, - que le monde commence, que nous n’avons pas à juger de son avenir par ce qu’a été son passé, que l’idée d’un destin dans les choses n’est pas une idée, mais un vertige, que nos rapports avec la nature ne sont pas fixés une fois pour toutes, que personne ne peut savoir ce que la liberté peut faire, ni imaginer ce que seraient les moeurs et les rapports humains dans une civilisation qui ne serait plus hantée par la compétition et la nécessité. Il ne met son espoir dans aucun destin, même favorable, mais justement dans ce qui en nous n’est pas destin, dans la contingence de notre histoire, et c’est sa négation qui est position. Faut-il même dire que le philosophe est humaniste ? Non, si l’on entend par homme un principe explicatif qu’il s’agirait de substituer à d’autres. On n’explique rien par l’homme, puisqu’il n’est pas une force, mais une faiblesse au coeur de l’être, un facteur cosmologique, mais le lieu où tous les facteurs cosmologiques, par une mutation qui n’est jamais finie, changent de sens et deviennent histoire. […] La philosophie nous éveille à ce que l’existence du monde et la nôtre ont de problématique en soi, à tel point que nous soyons à jamais guéris de chercher, comme disait Bergson, une solution dans le cahier du maître.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“The theoretical concepts of Freudianism are corrected and affirmed once they are understood, as suggested in the work of Melanie Klein, in terms of corporeality taken as itself the search of the external in the internal and of the internal in the external, that is, as a global and universal power of incorporation... A philosophy of the flesh finds itself in opposition to any interpretation of the unconscious in terms of "unconscious representations," a tribute paid by Freud to the psychology of bis day. The unconscious is feeling itself, since feeling is not the intellectual possession of "what" is felt, but a dispossession of ourselves in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to think in order that we may recognize it...The double formula of the unconscious ( "I did not know" and "I have not always known it'') corresponds to two aspects of the flesh, its poetic and its oneiric powers. When Freud presents the concept of repression in all its operational richness, it comprises a double movement of progress and regression, of openness toward the adult universe and of a relapse to the pregenital life, but henceforth called by its name, having become unconscious "homosexuality." Thus the repressed unconsciousness would be a secondary formation, contemporary with the formation of a system of perception-consciousness -- and the primordial unconsciousness would be a permissive being, the initial yes, the undividedness of feeling.

The preceding leads to the idea of the human body as a natural symbolism...We may ask what could be the relation between this tacit symbolism, or undividedness, and the artificial or conventional symbolism, which seems to be privileged, to open us toward ideal being and to truth.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“The reduction no longer involves a return to ideal being, but brings us back to the spirit of Heraclitus, to an interweaving of horizons, to an open Being.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“With Hegel something cornes to an end. After Hegel, there is a philosophical void. This is not to say that there has been a lack of thinkers or of geniuses, but that Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche start from a denial of philosophy. We might say that with the latter we enter an age of non-philosophy. But perhaps such a destruction of philosophy constitutes its very realization. Perhaps it preserves the essence of philosophy, and it may be, as Husserl wrote, that philosophy is reborn from its ashes.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“It is only withln the perceived world that we can understand that ail corporeality is already symbolism.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Whether we are dealing with organisms or animal societies, we do not find things subject to a law of all or nothing, but rather dynamic, unstable equilibria in which every rearrangement resumes already latent activities and transfigures them by decentering them. As a result, one cannot conceive of the relations between species or between the species and man in terms of a hierarchy. What there is is a difference of quality and for this very reason living creatures are not super-imposed upon one another, the transcendence of one by the other is, so to speak, lateral rather than frontal, and one meets all sorts of anticipations and reminiscences.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“All zoology assumes from our side a methodical Einfühlung into animal behavior, with the participation of the animal in our perceptive life and the participation of our perceptive life in animality.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“What is called nature is certainly not a spirit at work in things whose aim is to resolve problems by "the most simple means"--but neither is it simply the projection of a power of thought or determination present in us. It is that which makes there be, simply, and at a single stroke such a coherent structure of a being, which we then laboriously express in speaking of a "space-time continuum," of "curved space," or simply of "the most determinate path" of the anaclastic line. Nature is that which establishes privileged states, the "dominant traits" ( in the genetic sense of the word) which we try to comprehend through the combination of concepts--nature is an ontological derivation, a pure "passage,"
which is neither the only nor the best one possible,
which stands at the horizon of our thought as a fact which there can be no question of deducing. This facticity of nature is revealed to us in the universe of perception.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“The task of philosophy should be to describe this labyrinth, to elaborate a concept of being such that its contradictions, neither accepted nor "transcended," still have their place. What was impossible for modern dialectical philosophies, because the dialectic which they contained remained bound by a predialectical ontology, would become possible in an ontology which reveals in being itself an overlap or movement.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“There are, for example, two senses of the word
"nature" in Descartes ( nature in the sense of "natural light" and nature in the sense of "natural inclination"). These two interpretations outline two ontologies ( an ontology of the object and an ontology of the existent) which Descartes attempted to reconcile in his later writings where be discovers the 'being of God" (J. Laporte) beyond the possible and the actual, beyond finality and causation, beyond will and understanding...It is possible even that this shift in the Cartesian concept of nature is common to nearly all Western ontology...Do we not find everywhere the double certitude that being exists, that appearances are only a manifestation and a restriction of being--and that these appearances
are the canon of everything that we can understand by 'being," that in this respect it is being in-itself which appears as an ungraspable phantom, an Unding?...Viwed in this way, the continual shifting of philosophies from one perspective to the other would not involve any contradiction, in the sense of inadvertence or incoherence, but would be justified and founded upon being. All one could do is to ask the philosopher to admit this phenomenon and to reflect upon it, rather than merely suffering it and occupying alternatively two ontological positions, each of which excludes and invites the other.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“The perceived world is a world where there is discontinuity, where there is probability and generality, where each being is not constrained to a unique and fixed location, to an absolute density of being.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Beneath Cartesian nature, which theoretical activity sooner or later constructs, there emerges an anterior stratum, which is never suppressed, and which demands justification once the development of knowledge reveals the gaps in Cartesian science”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Dialectical thought developed after the philosophy of reflection and in a sense is its adversary since it conceives its own beginning as a problem, whereas the philosophy of reflection reduces the unreflected, as a simple absence, to the meaning which reflection thereafter discovers in it. However, one can say that the dialectic is "subjective" reflection in the sense understood by Kierkegaard or Heidegger, namely, that it does not make being rest upon itself but makes it appear before someone as the response to an interrogation...It is by means of what is most negative within subjectivity that it needs a world and by means of what is most positive within it that being needs non-being in order to circumscribe and delimit being. Thus dialectical thought invites us to revise the ordinary notions of subject and object.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“An effective contradiction exists only where the relation between the positive and the negative is not one of alternation, but where the negation of the negation is capable of exercising its function against itself as an abstract or immediate negation and so founding contradiction while founding its transcendence. The Hegelian notion of the negation of the negation is not a solution of despair, nor is it a verbal artifice to escape from embarrassment. It is the formula of every operative contradiction and by leaving it aside one abandons dialectical thought itself, which is the fecundity of contradiction. The notion of a labor of the negative, as a negation which neither exhausts itself in the exclusion of the positive nor, when confronted with it, exhausts itself in conjuring up a term which annuls it, but instead reconstructs the positive beyond its limitations, destroying it and preserving it, is not a gradual perfecting or sclerosis of dialectical thought: it is its primordial resort (moreover, it is not astonishing to find it intimated in Plato where he calls the "same" the "other than the other"). We have related the notion of negation to the modern notion of transcendence, that is to say, to a being which is in principle at a distance, in regard to which distance is a bond but with which there can be no question of coïncidence. Here, as in the other case, the relation of self to self passes through the external, the immediate demands mediation, or, again, mediation exists through the self.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Forgetfulness and rnemory recalled are two modes
of our oblique relation with a past that is present to
us only through the determinate void that it leaves
in us. These phenomenological descriptions are always somewhat misleading because they limit themselves to unraveling the negative in the positive and the positive in the negative.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“The unconscious is a perceiving consciousness... it operates as such through a logic of implication or promiscuity,”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“The
The distinction between the real and the oneiric cannot be identical with the simple distinction between consciousness filled by meaning and consciousness given up to its own void. The two modalities impinge upon one another. Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the cleavage between the real and the imaginary.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Whether we are trying to understand how consciousness can sleep, how it can be inspired by a past which it has apparently lost, or finally how it can open up again to that past, it is possible to speak of passivity only on the condition that "to be conscious" does not mean "to give a meaning" which one projects onto an ungraspable abject of knowledge, but to realize a certain distance, a certain variation in a field of existence already instituted, which is always behind us and whose weight, like that of an object in flight, only intervenes in the actions by which we transform it. For man, to live is not simply to be constantly conferring meaning upon things but to continue a vortex of experience which was set up at our birth, at the point of contact between the "outside" and he who is called to live it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“What we understand by the concept of institution are those events in experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history--or again those events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as survivals or residues, but as the invitation to a sequel, the necessity of a future.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“It is only afterwards, once human invention has reintegrated them in the meaning of the totality, that the hazards of history can appear to be and are in fact rational without there being any place for the assumption of a hidden reason which orients them through the "ruse" of appearing in the guise of
contingency.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Historical invention works through a matrix of open and unfinished significations presented by the present. Like the touch of a sleepwalker, it touches in things only what they have in them that belongs to the future.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Language is the system of differentiations through which the individual articulates his relation to the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“All writers who are unprejudiced and open to the future know what they do not want better than what they do want.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Variations in Ianguage, which at first appear to support the skeptic, are ultimately the proof of its meaning, since words would not change in meaning unless they were trying to say something.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“The body is the seat of a certain praxis, the point from which there is something to do in the world, the register in which we are inscribed and whose inscription we continue.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“When two fixed points are projected in succession on a screen they are seen as two traces of a single movement in which they even lose their distinct existence. Here what happens is that the external forces insert themselves into a system of equivalents that is ready to function and in which they operate upon us, like signs in a language, not by arousing their uniquely correspondent significations but, like mileposts, in a process which is still unfolding, or as though they were picking out a path which, as it were, inspired them from a distance. Thus perception is already expression. But this natural language
does not isolate; it does not ''bring out" what is
expressed, but allows it to adhere in its own way more to the "perceptual chain" than to the "verbal
chain." When Gestalt theorists show that the perception of motion depends upon numerous figural moments and ultimately on the whole structure of the field, they are sketching in the same way as the perceiving subject a sort of thinking apparatus which is his incarnate and habitua! being. The accomplishment of motion and change of location emanate from a field structure apart from which they are unintelligible.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Perception is already expression.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie

“Every perception is the perception of something
solely by way of being at the same time the relative
imperception of a horizon or background which it
implies but does not thematize. Perceptual consciousness is therefore indirect or even inverted in relation to an ideal of adequation which it presumes but never encounters directly.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie