Key Arguments

• After describing life as a single temporality and cohesion, he writes: 'It is this advent or rather this transcendental event that the Cogito recovers. The fundamental truth is certainly that “I think,” but only on condition of understanding by this that “I belong to myself”53 in being in the world.'
• He notes that radical reflection which tries 'to go farther into subjectivity' by placing everything in doubt only reaches 'the non-human ground by which, according to Rimbaud’s phrase, “we are not in the world”54 as the horizon of our particular engagements and as the power of something in general that is the phantom of the world,' indicating that even the sense of exile presupposes a worldly horizon.
• He formulates the paradoxical unity of interior and exterior: 'The interior and the exterior are inseparable. The world is entirely on the inside, and I am entirely outside of myself.'
• Perceptual examples show this double movement of gathering and distance: 'When I perceive this table, the perception of the top must clearly not be unaware of the perception of the legs, otherwise the object would come apart. When I hear a melody, each moment must clearly be tied to the following one, otherwise there would be no melody. And yet, the table certainly has external parts, and succession is essential to the melody.'
• This leads to the formulation: 'The act that gathers together also moves away and holds at a distance; I only touch myself by escaping from myself,' meaning that self‑relation is achieved through opening onto an exterior world.
• Recalling Pascal, he says 'from a certain angle I understand the world and from another the world understands me,' and then adds: 'It must now be said that this is in fact the same angle,' explicitly identifying the two perspectives.
• He explains that 'I understand the world because there is for me a near and a far away, foregrounds and horizons, and because in this way the world sketches out a scene and takes on a sense before my eyes; in short, I understand the world because I am situated in the world and because the world understands me,' so my situatedness is simultaneously my grasp of the world and the world’s grasp of me.
• By insisting that interior and exterior, self‑belonging and being‑in‑the‑world, are one and the same structure, he rejects both a purely inward Cogito detached from the world and a world conceived as a mere object independent of subjectivity.

Source Quotes

Likewise, as we have seen, when I move around an object, I do not obtain a series of perspectival views that I subsequently coordinate through the idea of a unique geometrical plan (all I find is a bit of “indeterminacy” [bougé] in the thing that crosses through time all by itself), so too am I not a series of psychical acts, nor for that matter a central I who gathers them together in a synthetic unity, but rather a single experience that is inseparable from itself, a single “cohesion of life,”52 a single temporality that unfolds itself [s’explicite] from its birth and confirms this birth in each present. It is this advent or rather this transcendental event that the Cogito recovers. The fundamental truth is certainly that “I think,” but only on condition of understanding by this that “I belong to myself”53 in being in the world.

It is this advent or rather this transcendental event that the Cogito recovers. The fundamental truth is certainly that “I think,” but only on condition of understanding by this that “I belong to myself”53 in being in the world. When we attempt to go farther into subjectivity, when we place everything into doubt and suspend all of our beliefs, we only succeed in catching sight of the non-human ground by which, according to Rimbaud’s phrase, “we are not in the world”54 as the horizon of our particular engagements and as the power of something in general that is the phantom of the world.

The fundamental truth is certainly that “I think,” but only on condition of understanding by this that “I belong to myself”53 in being in the world. When we attempt to go farther into subjectivity, when we place everything into doubt and suspend all of our beliefs, we only succeed in catching sight of the non-human ground by which, according to Rimbaud’s phrase, “we are not in the world”54 as the horizon of our particular engagements and as the power of something in general that is the phantom of the world. The interior and the exterior are inseparable.

When we attempt to go farther into subjectivity, when we place everything into doubt and suspend all of our beliefs, we only succeed in catching sight of the non-human ground by which, according to Rimbaud’s phrase, “we are not in the world”54 as the horizon of our particular engagements and as the power of something in general that is the phantom of the world. The interior and the exterior are inseparable. The world is entirely on the inside, and I am entirely outside of myself. When I perceive this table, the perception of the top must clearly not be unaware of the perception of the legs, otherwise the object would come apart.

And yet, the table certainly has external parts, and succession is essential to the melody. The act that gathers together also moves away and holds at a distance; I only touch myself by escaping from myself. In a famous pensée, Pascal shows that from a certain angle I understand the world and from another the world understands me.55 It must now be said that this is in fact the same angle: I understand the world because there is for me a near and a far away, foregrounds and horizons, and because in this way the world sketches out a scene and takes on a sense before my eyes; in short, I understand the world because I am situated in the world and because the world understands me.

The act that gathers together also moves away and holds at a distance; I only touch myself by escaping from myself. In a famous pensée, Pascal shows that from a certain angle I understand the world and from another the world understands me.55 It must now be said that this is in fact the same angle: I understand the world because there is for me a near and a far away, foregrounds and horizons, and because in this way the world sketches out a scene and takes on a sense before my eyes; in short, I understand the world because I am situated in the world and because the world understands me. We are not saying that the notion of the world is inseparable from the notion of the subject, nor that

Key Concepts

• It is this advent or rather this transcendental event that the Cogito recovers.
• The fundamental truth is certainly that “I think,” but only on condition of understanding by this that “I belong to myself”53 in being in the world.
• we only succeed in catching sight of the non-human ground by which, according to Rimbaud’s phrase, “we are not in the world”54 as the horizon of our particular engagements and as the power of something in general that is the phantom of the world.
• The interior and the exterior are inseparable. The world is entirely on the inside, and I am entirely outside of myself.
• The act that gathers together also moves away and holds at a distance; I only touch myself by escaping from myself.
• In a famous pensée, Pascal shows that from a certain angle I understand the world and from another the world understands me.55 It must now be said that this is in fact the same angle:
• I understand the world because there is for me a near and a far away, foregrounds and horizons, and because in this way the world sketches out a scene and takes on a sense before my eyes; in short, I understand the world because I am situated in the world and because the world understands me.

Context

Final segment of the cited passage in subsection [q. The subject as a project of the world, a field, temporality, and the cohesion of a life.], where Merleau‑Ponty explicitly redefines the Cogito in terms of belonging‑in‑the‑world and articulates the inseparability of interior and exterior using examples of perception and reference to Pascal and Rimbaud.