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The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961 QUOTES

The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961 QUOTES

1 " Reflection...discloses an unreflected which is in principle not outside of its grasp but which it does also not reabsorb...The subject escapes itself in seizing itself or seizes itself in its escape...A contact with being that is before theoria--philosophy is this theoria that discloses the pre-theoretical. A contact with the being that is concealment as well as unconcealing...If the analytic of consciousness always comes too late, after; if the world is always pre-constituted, pre-given, self-evident, what do we call that which makes it emerge? "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961

2 " Posit the unconscious not as a first consciousness to be masked, i.e., forgotten adequation...but as indirect consciousness or without exactitude or thinking for itself...according to a system of signs weakly articulated...As a result, the ego and its 'defense mechanisms' are also to be conceived in these terms: their avoidance of the repressed is not knowledge of the unconscious but indirect consciousness as well; that which is to be avoided is not denied (which would be to say known) but bypassed--the ego as official, thetic, recognized domain...Through this reform, one will no longer have causality of the id or causality of the ego--one will have a relationship that is not face to face--a relationship of infrastructure to superstructure, i.e., the sexual = the Soil that supports life. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961

3 " I am not at all simple: others are in me...there is an exchange--not being for itself + being for others but the for each other...What I am 'for myself' I am also 'for others'; what he is 'for himself' he is also 'for me--This is impossible to think for 'consciousness': it can feel itself annulled only by the absolute other, absolutely guilty, absolutely unjustifiable, responsible, condemned--but if I am an existence, i.e., always bound to inertia, to others different from myself, this generativity absolves me: I know I will not be a consciousness by negating it. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961

4 " It is necessary that a line, as a trace of movements, must be a rhythm, a law...a field of possibilities beyond the probable. This spatiality is meta-spatial...A line arouses the field that gives it sense by deforming the field given...It is a systematic error, 'coherent deformation'--thus each painting is the creation of a dimensionality--thus (1) the painting is a world for itself, not a copy of the world; (2) it expresses indirectly and not by returning to the object. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961

5 " Painting is a movement, a movement that sprouts within the appearance, which is dictated by it, by no means a movement inspired by the intellect...So why is painting so different from appearances? Precisely because it is Nature...natura naturans...because it provides what nature wants to say but has not said: the 'generative principle' that makes things and the world be, 'first Cause,' 'brain or heart of creation,' 'absolute knowledge,' is the principle older than God himself (Schelling), raw being--the indelible-indestructible (Michaux)--And its intelligibility to itself: a center 'far from centers'...Transcendence...(before or after the world, not correlated with the world). The 'prototype,' that is to say the self-evident world placed in a halo of possibilities of which it is only an 'example.' One deforms precisely in order to seize upon the form in its birth. Thus painting is a kind of philosophy: seizing upon the genesis of philosophy in action. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961