In the “Preface” of his highly influential work Phenomenology of Perception (originally published in 1945), the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote the following words about philosophy. Perhaps they can serve as an inspiration to embrace and even encourage the experience of being a beginner:
“There is no thought that encompasses all of our thought… The philosopher is a perpetual beginner. This means that he accepts noting as established from what men or scientists believe they know. This also means that philosophy itself must not take itself as established in the truths it has managed to utter, that philosophy is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning, that it consists entirely in describing this beginning, and finally, that radical reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life that is its initial, constant, and final situation.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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