Other Selves and the Human World

» 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. […] 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 society within ourselves as an object of thought, in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object.

— Other Selves and the Human World, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; p 421