Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP) Quotes

“History flows neither from the past nor to the future alone: it reverses its course and, when you get right down to it, flows from all the presents.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“We are human precisely insofar as we always intend a singularity across the thickness of our lives, insofar as we are grouped around this unique interior where there is no one, which is latent, veiled, and escapes from us always leaving behind in our hands truth which are like traces of its absence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“Is drawing near to speech, speaking, seeing, thinking oresently, rediscovering speech, vision, thoughts which are vertical (=abyssal) a 'mysticism' without God? Coincidence? No: it is not extraphilosophical, coincidence with an unsayable, an external ineffable. All of speculation is necessary in order to discover a sense for this prespeculative Being. But what will we say about it? Everything that we will say about it will be in principle false. Silence? There really would be indirect language...which would not try to objectify the said, but which gives it through gestures = poetry--And we could generalize: history, life, Passions. But then philosophy replaced by art, poetry, life? No, because they speak only silently. Philosophy as the thematization of this speaking silence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“The idea of tradition is this double movement: being other in order to be the same, forgetting in order to conserve, producing in order to receive, looking ahead in order to receive the entire force of the past.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“Ideality is truly an inter-being, a cloth between 'thoughts' or production, a field in which the different, factual Einfühlungen are the partial realizations of one Speech.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“Stiftung is not enveloping thought, but open thought, not the intended and Vorhabe of an actual center, but an 'off-center' which will be rectified, not the positing of an end, but the positing of a style, not a frontal grasp but a lateral divergence, algae brought back from the depths.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“To think is not having but not having.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“The universe of thought, like that of perception, is lacunary and baroque in itself.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“The possible is the openness of the perceived world and not a system of logical Being in which we would be set up through idealization.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“But this 'structural' or concrete a priori is neither a Kantian category nor even a Hegelian idea; it is the universal ground of sense=the sense funally, far fro, being an idea, is a ground. Philosophy seeks in the archeology of the ground, in the depth and not in the height (the ideas)...the ground in the literal sense: the earth.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“In this transgression, one does not know who is engulfing and who is engulfed.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“Empathy makes it that there is "the one" and not "the same.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“Ideal being is omnitemporal, because to remember former ideations is to begin them again in the consciousness of rebeginning: i.e., in in the consciousness that this present activity is the other side of past activity. The instantaneousness, the Erzeugung, which seemed to be obstacles to the permanence of ideal being, are on the contrary what founds it insofar as they are a call to reiteration. Simply, ideal objectivity is not in something before me; it is is the lateral connection, the hidden and internal attachment of different ideations which are identified with one another across memory, conjugation of passivity and activity, equivalence of a passivity and an activity, encroachment of one on the other: passivity as mold or negativity of an activity.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“What is at issue is to recognize the operation in us which is us and which is not ours.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“The Wesen is sense of radiation, connected to materials, ingraspable outside of the fact or outside of existence. It is the way in which a whole is produced and reproduced, inseparable from this production. (verbal) Wesen”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“What does it mean to think?: we rediscover a path that the thing has already traversed.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“The abyss is not to be conceived of as lack of Being, but as more than Being.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“Circularity--a dangerous word. Circularity of Heraclitus, yes: to go in one direction is truly to go in the other. A thick identity there, which truly contains difference.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“A determinate emptiness: a lack, a privation, a dimension (new type of intellectual existence).”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“Trace: presence of an absent: experience of an absence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“This phenomenology, however, is always on the horizon, because it is the will to exhaust the things themselves, which are inexhaustible. What makes it already be there--never there--is its radicalism, which gives way to an impassioned fermentation.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“In the horizon, there is no subject and object. We are there like the others; we are, like the others, drawn out of this horizonal being, divergences or variants in relation to it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“Culture, which is not explicit knowledge, intellectual possession, but which is nonignorance, knowledge of ignorance, presence in me of the past as past, and which assures the communication between me and history, because the tradition is forgetful of origins, relation to an origin which is not possessed by the present, and which works in us and provokes geometry in advance, precisely because it is not possessed by thought. What I have in my presence in order to understand the past is a tradition, that is, a fullness made out of a certain emptiness (out of a certain 'forgetfulness'), a circumscribed negativity, which therefore makes a reference to the outside.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“In our very present, we discover a layer of spiritual being, i.e., of historical being, delimiting a 'space of humanity,' and geometry is offered as belonging to it, I.e., geometry is offered as connected to a past in general, to men who as such are not known by us. But this nonknowledge is a knowledge. The essence of tradition lies in being not immediately graspable in a static essence. In front of our reflection, geometry and its tradition become a hollow; they open a dimension.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“There has to be an ideality which has need of time.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“..There is no contradiction between reflection as enveloping the past and the past as enveloping my present, because we are communicating through the depth-dimension. According to the depth-dimension, we are in the past and the past lives in us...We are moments of the open field...which is Sinngenesis, sense in genesis, emerging once and for all.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“How to rediscover the emerging sense of philosophy? By expanding our thoughts, our lived situation of the philosopher through those of the ancients, and those of the ancients by ours. This reciprocal contestation unveils the common field of which philosophies are only sections.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“What is at issue is to reach the 'originary' sense, the emerging or arising sense of the geometry that we are receiving--and which is not merely an event of the past, which continues to work in its development and in its present, which makes the geometry from geometry, which makes its unity. Therefore, in geometry there is something other than the lived thoughts of Galileo and others--taken up or realized again by others--there is a 'sense' which is larger, 'deeper,' onto which their thought opens, a field which is intended right off, but not enveloped by their thought, and which is still present in the whole history of geometry...The emergence of the sense, the depth - dimensions of geometry and of physics, which did not happen within one or several heads, is the model for thinking universal history, which is always the openness of fields.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts

“The unthought can only appear through contact.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (SPEP): Including Texts