5
" Every mathematical idea presents itself to us with the character of a construction after the fact, a reconquest. Cultural constructions never have the solidity of natural objects. They are never there in the same way. Each morning, after night has intervened, we must make contact with them again. They remain impalpable; they float in the air of the village but the countryside does contain them. If, nevertheless, in the fullness of thought, the truths of culture seem to us the measure of being, and if so many philosophies posit the world upon them, it is because knowledge continues upon the thrust of perception. It is because knowledge uses the world-thesis which is its fundamental sound. We believe truth is eternal because truth expresses the perceived world and perception implies a world which was functioning before it and according to principles which it discovers and does not posit. In one and the same movement knowledge roots itself in perception and distinguishes itself from perception. Knowledge is an effort to recapture, to internalize, truly to possess a meaning that escapes perception at the very moment that it takes shape there, because it is interested only in the echo that
being draws from itself, not in this resonator, its own other which makes the echo possible. Perception opens us to a world already constituted and can only reconstitute it. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Prose of the World
9
" We are trying to show not that mathematical thought rests upon the sensible but that it is creative...Non-Euclidean geometries contain
Euclid's geometry as a particular case but not the inverse. What is essential to mathematical thought, therefore, lies in the moment where a structure is decentered, opens up to questioning, and reorganizes itself according to a new meaning which is nevertheless the meaning of this same structure. The truth of the result, its value independent of the content, consists in its not involving a change in which the initial relations dissolve, to be replaced by others in which they would be unrecognizable. Rather, the truth lies in a restructuring which, from one end to the other, is known to itself, is congruent with itself, a restructuring which was announced in the vectors of the initial structure by its style, so that each effective change is the fulfillment of an intention, and each anticipation receives from the structure the completion it needed. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Prose of the World
19
" If the other person is really another, at a certain stage I must be surprised, disoriented. If we are to meet not just through what we have in common but in what is different between us— which presupposes a transformation of myself and of the other
as well—then our differences can no longer be opaque qualities. They must become meaning. In the perception of the other, this happens when the other organism, instead of "behaving" like me, engages with the things in my world in a style that is at first
mysterious to me but which at least seems to me a coherent style because it responds to certain possibilities which fringed the things in my world. Similarly, when I am reading, there must be a certain moment where the author's intention escapes me, where he withdraws himself. Then I catch up from behind, fall into step, or else I turn over a few pages and, a bit later, a happy phrase brings me back and leads me to the core of the new signification, and I find access to it through one of its "aspects" which
was already part of my experience. Rationality, or the agreement of minds, does not require that we all reach the same idea by the same road, or that significations be enclosed in definitions. It requires only that every experience contain points of catch for all other ideas and that "Ideas" have a configuration. This double requirement is the
postulation of a world. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Prose of the World
20
" The happy writer and the speaking man are neither so greatly nor so little conscientious. They do not wonder, before speaking, whether speech is possible. They do not contemplate the sorrow of language which is the necessity of not saying everything if one is to say something. They sit happily in the shade of a great tree and continue aloud the internal monologue. Their thought germinates in speech and, without seeking it, they are understood, making themselves other, while saying what is most singular to them. They truly abide in themselves, without feeling exiled from the other. And because they
are fully convinced that what seems evident to them is true, they say it quite simply. They cross bridges of snow without seeing how fragile those are, using to the very limit that extraordinary power given to every mind of convincing others and entering into
their little corner when it believes itself to be coextensive with the truth. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Prose of the World
