Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Existence Quotes

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Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Lichtenberg … held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. … It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was strange (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act 'sexual' or 'non-sexual'. There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty