Quotes About Philosophy

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.

I do not believe that what one gives to the sciences is taken from philosophy.

But where are these reference events and these landmarks themselves? They refer us to others, and the answer satisfies us only because we do not attend to it, because we think we are 'at home.' The question would arise again and indeed would be inexhaustible, almost insane, if we wished to situate our levels, measure our standards in their turn, if we were to ask: but where is the world itself? And why am I myself? Am I really alone to be me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?

There is no sphere of immanence, no realm in which my consciousness is fully at home and secure against all risk of error.

There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency.

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

Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.

What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light.

Faith--in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified-enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal with the existing world. Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustibJe and our information limited.

What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference.

The subject is not so much the intelligent subject as the desiring subject.

It is only withln the perceived world that we can understand that ail corporeality is already symbolism.

The world and others become our flesh.

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.

Animality is the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated meaning.

What is Philosophy? The domain of the Verborgen (philosophy and occultism).

True philosophy entails relearning to see the world anew.

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

From the moment of conception and still more after birth, there is an encroachment towards a future which is made from itself, under certain given conditions, and which is not the act of a donation of sense. Birth is not an act of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act.

Scientific points of view are always both naïve and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted without explicitly mentioning it, that other point of view, namely that of the consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself around me and begins to exist for me.

The future must not be contained in the present, but neither is it something which would be added on to the present by an a tergo necessity. The future would come from the present itself. They would continue each other.

Time is never completely constituted.

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.