Quotes About Philosophy

Psychological reflection, however, obliges us to place the precise world back into its cradle of consciousness, to ask ourselves how the very idea of the precise world or of precise truth is possible, and to seek out its first springing forth into consciousness. (...) Consciousness must be brought face to face with its unreflective life in things and must awaken to its own, forgotten, history - this is the true role of philosophical reflection.

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

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.

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

To think: to encircle an unthought.

A determinate emptiness: a lack, a privation, a dimension (new type of intellectual existence).

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

Existence turning back upon itself but without succeeding in carrying itself away.

The unthought can only appear through contact.

The question is to know whether, as Sartre says, there are only humans and things or whether there is also the interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made.

The awareness of truth advances like a crab, turned towardits point of departure, toward that structure whose signification it expresses.

The sensible world is full of gaps, ellipses, allusions.

The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them: each of its qualities is the whole. Cézanne said that you should be able to paint the smell of trees.

But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.

What does it mean to think?: we rediscover a path that the thing has already traversed.

This colored surface holds itself together; it does not receive its unity from our representation or from a representation of its own.

All theory is at the same time a practice...The link between theory and practice is not one of linear dependency. It is a circular relationship where envelopment is reciprocal.

What dreams in us is our existential field.

Very few philosophers have been anarchists. Nearly all of them admit that a State and a power are necessary. They do not wash their hands of it, and yet they do not consent to the myth. Or, when they do, they nonetheless give warning that it is a myth. This is the source of their uneasiness. It is not an anomaly or an aristocratic malady.

The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind.

L'Être est ce qui exige de nous création pour que nous en ayons l'expérience.

Philosophy, precisely as 'Being speaking within us,' expression of the mute experience by itself, is creation. A creation that is at the same time a reintegration of Being...for...it knows itself to be a Gebilde and wishes to surpass itself as pure Gebilde, to find again its origin. It is hence a creation in a radical sense: a creation that is at the same time an adequation, the only way to obtain an adequation...Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it.

These clarifications allow us to understand motricity unequivocally as original intentionality. Consciousness is originally not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can.