Quotes About Experience

Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not an object at all; it is not really set out in front of us. It is our soil — not what is in front of us, facing us, but rather, that which carries us.

The thing offers itself as preliminary, primordial, anterior to all perception, like a landscape that is there before us and just as we will see it afterward...But at the same time, I can posit this universe anterior to me only as I perceive it...Bergson thus posits consciously a paradox inherent to perception: Being is anterior to perception, and this primordial Being is conceivable only in relation to perception.

In the movement of experience, which brings understanding, we reach the absolute which is not something behind it or under it, but which is a water-mark within it and which exists only as a water-mark. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Love cannot be given a name by the lover who lives it...If we are situated, then we are surrounded and cannot be transparent to ourselves, and thus our contact with ourselves must only be accomplished in ambiguity.

The structure of behavior is neither thing nor consciousness, and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind.

Ambiguity is not a lack of univocity. Ambiguity is 'good'...In truth, we have experience of knowledge and knowledge of experience. These two faces of ambiguity are abstractions. The absolute is that which is between the two: the transformation of one into the other. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

To be conscious is, among other things, to be somewhere else.

The first exterior contact, the first exteroceptive stimulus, is the human voice.

We do not keep the world, or situations, or others at the length of our gaze like a spectacle; we are intermingled with them, drinking them in through all our pores.

It is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing...Form and content – what is said and the way in which it is said – cannot exist separately from one another.

The inside is seen in the outside--grasps it better than itself. Relation to the outside that is not 'representation' but ecstasy...And reciprocally, the visible is the transactions, the chemistry, the music, and interrelationship and the 'operation of interests' [Claudel] of Anima.

If we want to understand the process of Nature in itself, we could say that Nature is the memory of the world.

The objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body...which has merely a conceptual existence.

Our open and personal existence rests upon an initial foundation of acquired and congealed existence.

Silent speech through which the thing dengt and the world Weltet .

Painting...gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a "muscular sense" in order to possess the voluminosity of the world. This voracious vision, reaching beyond the "visual givens," opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house.

I feel the substance of my body escaping through my head and crossing the limits of my objective body when an ascending elevator stops abruptly.

Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of y body is made explicit in the language of external perception.

The theory of the body schema is implicitly a theory of perception. We have learned to again sense our bodies; we have discovered, beneath objective and detached knowledge of the body, this other knowledge that we have of it because it is always with us and because we are bodies. It will be necessary to similarly awaken the experience of the world such as it appears to us insofar as we are in the world through our bodies, and insofar as we perceive the world with our bodies.

All knowledge is established within the horizons opened up by perception.

Deepen the notion of gnosia through that of praxia. It's a matter of grasping mind in its nascent state.

Perception grounds everything because it shows us, so to speak, an obsessional relation with being; it is there before us, and yet it touches us from within.

The universal is not the concept but this perception given in flesh and blood.

Nature resists. It cannot be entirely established in front of us. The body is a nature at work within us.