21
" 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
22
" 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
31
" 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
32
" 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