Quotes From Merleau- Ponty

Quotes to meditate on from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Bracketed questions for self-reflection [] or ignore them and pose your own. Enjoy

On Attention/Seeing

“To see is always to see from somewhere”

“…to see an object is to plunge into it… objects form a system in which one object cannot appear without canceling others”

“I apply my gaze to a fragment of the landscape, which becomes animated and displaced while the other objects recede into the margins and become dormant, but they do not cease to be there”

[What are we looking at and from where? When we pay attention to something all else falls to the background. What are we paying attention to in this attention economy]

On time/temporality/The present

“I have my actual present seen as the future of the past”

“The present still holds in hand the immediate past, but without positing it as an object, and since this immediate past likewise retains the past that immediately prevented it time gone by is entirely taken up and grasped in the present”

“Each present can claim to solidify our life, this is what defines it as present”

[What aspects of your past does your present privilege?]

On The embodied past

“The specific past, which is our body, can only be recovered and taken up by an individual life because this life has never transcended it, because it secretly feeds this past and uses a part of its strength there, because this past remains its present, as is seen in the season in which the bodily events become the events of the day. What allows us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is inseparably both freedom and servitude.”