Quotes About Experience

Phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its "conditions of possibility," but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world.

From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in "stories" and, as it were, pointed at.

philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with "word-meanings", it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.

We might say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself--or that the world is at the heart of our flesh.

For us the essential is to know precisely what the being of the world means. Here we must presuppose nothing—neither the naïve idea of being in itself, therefore, nor the correlative idea of a being of representation, of a being for the consciousness, of a being for man: these, along with the being of the world, are all notions that we have to rethink with regard to our experience of the world.

There is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place, and which is not simply nothing, even though it cannot be conveyed by a description.

There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories.

Moonlight and sunlight in our memory are presented before all else, not as sensory contents, but as a certain type of symbiosis, a certain manner that the outside has of invading us, a certain manner that we have of receiving it.

We would speak of nothing if it were only necessary to speak of that with which we coincide, since speech is already a separation. Moreover, there is no experience without speech, the purely lived is not even found within man's speaking life. But the primary sense of speech is, nevertheless, in this text of experience that it attempts to utter.

The world and others become our flesh.

The body is the seat of a certain praxis, the point from which there is something to do in the world, the register in which we are inscribed and whose inscription we continue.

The relation to the world, such as it tirelessly announces itself within us, is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice.

The abyss is not to be conceived of as lack of Being, but as more than Being.

The...present is itself a transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it was just there, one never coincides with it--It is not a segment of time with defined contours that would come and set itself in place. It is a cycle defined by a central and dominant region and with indecisive contours--a swelling or bulb of time...an institution, a system of equivalences.

In this exchange between the subject of sensation and the sensible, it cannot be said that one acts while the other suffers the action, nor that one gives sense to the other...The sensible gives back to me what I had lent to it, but I received it from the sensible in the first place.

Time is not a line, but rather a network of intentionalities.

Surpassing surpasses only through recurrence.

In the horizon, there is no subject and object. We are there like the others; we are, like the others, drawn out of this horizonal being, divergences or variants in relation to it.

My organism--as a pre-personal adhesion to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence--plays the role of an innate complex beneath the level of my personal life. My organism is not like some inert thing, it itself sketches out the movement of existence.

Institution...is neither perceived nor thought as a concept. It is the wherewithal on which I count at eh moment, which is seen nowhere and is assumed by everything that is visible for a human beimg, it is what is at issue each moment and which has no name and no identity in our theories of consciousness.

The Umwelt is less and less oriented toward a goal and more and more toward the interpretation of symbols.

The living physiology of the nervous system can only be understood by starting from phenomenal givens.

Trace: presence of an absent: experience of an absence.

Personal existence is intermittent