Ying
Location: Neither here nor there.
Favourite Philosopher
Fuxi, king Wen of Zhou, the duke of Zhou, Laozi, Liezi, Zhuangzi, Sunzi, Yagyu Munenori, Miyamoto Musashi, Takuan Soho, Democritus of Abdera, Pyrrho of Elis, Carneades, Arcesilaus, Sextus Empiricus, Socrates, Antisthenes, Diogenes of Sinope, Crates of Thebes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, Franz Brentano, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault.
Favourite Quotations
"Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see. ‘There is in natural intuition a sort of “crypto-mechanism” which we have to break in order to reach phenomenal being’ or again a dialectic whereby perception hides itself from itself. But although it is of the essence of consciousness to forget its own phenomena thus enabling ‘things’ to be constituted, this forgetfulness is not mere absence, it is the absence of something which consciousness could bring into its presence: in other words consciousness can forget phenomena only because it can recall them, it neglects them in favour of things only because they are the cradle of things. For example they are never completely unknown to scientific consciousness, which borrows all its models from the structures of living experience; it simply does not ‘thematize’ them, or make explicit the horizons of perceptual consciousness surrounding it to whose concrete relationships it tries to give objective expression. Experience of phenomena is not, then, like Bergsonian intuition, that of a reality of which we are ignorant and leading to which there is no methodical bridge—it is the making explicit or bringing to light of the prescientific life of consciousness which alone endows scientific operations with meaning and to which these latter always refer back. It is not an irrational conversion, but an intentional analysis."
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology of Perception", p. 67, 68
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology of Perception", p. 67, 68
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