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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

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All Thought Of Something

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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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.

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The Body Is Our General Medium For Having A World.

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Nothing Determines Me From Outside, Not Because Nothing Acts Upon Me, But, On The Contrary, Because I Am From The Start Outside Myself And Open To The World.

The Child Lives In A World Which He Unhesitatingly Believes Accessible To All Around Him.

Speech Is Not A Means In The Service Of An External End. It Contains Its Own Rule Of Usage, Ethics, And View Of The World, As A Gesture Sometimes Bears The Whole Truth About A Man.

I Discover Vision, Not As A 'thinking About Seeing,' To Use Descartes Expression, But As A Gaze At Grips With A Visible World, And That Is Why For Me There Can Be Another's Gaze.

As A Matter Of Principle, Humanity Is Precarious: Each Person Can Only Believe What He Recognizes To Be True Internally And, At The Same Time, Nobody Thinks Or Makes Up His Mind Without Already Being Caught Up In Certain Relationships With Others, Which Leads Him To Opt For A Particular Set Of Opinions.

Socrates Reminds Us That It Is Not The Same Thing, But Almost The Opposite, To Understand Religion And To Accept It.

I Will Never Know How You See Red And You Will Never Know How I See It. But This Separation Of Consciousness Is Recognized Only After A Failure Of Communication, And Our First Movement Is To Believe In An Undivided Being Between Us.

True Reflection Presents Me To Myself Not As Idle And Inaccessible Subjectivity, But As Identical With My Presence In The World And To Others, As I Am Now Realizing It: I Am All That I See, I Am An Intersubjective Field, Not Despite My Body And Historical Situation, But, On The Contrary, By Being This Body And This Situation, And Through Them, All The Rest.

To Understand Is To Experience Harmony Between What We Aim At And What Is Given, Between The Intention And The Performance - And The Body Is Our Anchorage In The World.

I Am Not In Front Of My Body, I Am In It Or Rather I Am It... If We Can Still Speak Of Interpretation In Relation To The Perception Of One's Own Body, We Shall Have To Say That It Interprets Itself.

Because We Are In The World, We Are Condemned To Meaning, And We Cannot Do Or Say Anything Without Its Acquiring A Name In History.

The Phenomenological World Is Not The Bringing To Explicit Expression Of A Pre-existing Being, But The Laying Down Of Being. Philosophy Is Not The Reflection Of A Pre-existing Truth, But, Like Art, The Act Of Bringing Truth Into Being.

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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.

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The Perceived World Is The Always-presupposed Foundation Of All Rationality, All Value, And All Existence.

It Is A Great Good Fortune, As Stendhal Said, For One "to Have His Passion As A Profession.

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I Live In The Facial Expressions Of The Other, As I Feel Him Living In Mine.

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We Should Be Sensitive To The Thread Of Silence From Which The Tissue Of Speech Is Woven.

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Our View Of Man Will Remain Superficial So Long As We Fail To Go Back To That Origin [of Silence], So Long As We Fail To Find, Beneath The Chatter Of Words, The Primordial Silence, And As Long As We Do Not Describe The Action Which Breaks This Silence. The Spoken Word Is A Gesture, And Its Meaning, A World.

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