There are times, during our encounters with the spiritual products of others, that we come across statements which alter the course of our own thinking. Perhaps, they awaken us from a kind of dogmatic approach to life; reawakening us to vast possibilities we never before considered. I would like to share one such passage, which altered the course of my life, in the hope of generating some disscussion, or perhaps, merely compiling a list of significant quotations.
I encountered this one upon the completion of my degree in history and it immeadiately sent me into an existential crises, leading me to my current immersion into philosophy. I hope that those with the proper ears might hear my the beauty of my pain, my awe, and my greatest fear in the following series of passages.
“As soon as existence collects itself together and commits itself to some line of conduct, it falls beneath perception. Like every other perception, this one asserts more things than it grasps: when I say that I see an ash-tray over there, I suppose as completed an unfolding of experience which could go on ad infinitum, and I commit a whole perceptual future.”
“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: I may well turn away from it, but not to cease to be situated relatively to it. Our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgement. It is as false to place ourselves in society as an object among other objects, as it is to place place society within ourselves as an object of thought, in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object.”
“Objective and acientific consciousness of the past and of civilizations would be impossible had I not, through the intermediary of my society, my cultural world and their horizons, at least a possible communication with them, an if the place of the Athenian Republic or the Roman Empire were not somewhere marked out on the borders of my own history, an if they were not there as so many individuals to be known, indeterminate but pre-existing, and if I did not find in my own life the basic structures of history.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty The Phenomenology of Perception.
Any thoughts or observations, or perhaps a qute of your own?