"I am not a living creature nor even a "man", nor again a "consciousness", endowed with all the characteristics which zoology, social anatomy, or inductive psychology recognized in these various products of the natural or historical process- I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the world can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished- since that distance is not one of its properties- if I were not there to scan it with my gaze."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
