Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes
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.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, p. xix.
He was discussing his unprecedented steps that as Federal Reserve Chairman he took to cope with the Great Recession after the Meltdown of 2008. He had, as a graduate doctoral student, studied the economic history of the Great Depression of 1929 and the government attempts to ameliorate some of the effects. He was one of the few people in government who had this historical perspective.
Msny humsnists disagree with this generalization. There are some humanists whose belief structure is very close to that of religion except they have few if any rituals and do not rely on a particular conceopt of a God. Others are as Moc=vack describes.
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
