Quotes About Philosophy

It is true that we discover the unreflected. But the unreflected we go back to is not that which is prior to philosophy or prior to reflection. It is the unreflected which is understood and conquered by reflection.

Love is not created by circumstances, or by decision; it consists in the way questions and answers are linked together--by means of an attraction, something more slips in, we discover not exactly what we were seeking, but something else that is interesting

Blind logic, logic which creates on the way.

The world is nothing but world-as-meaning

Experience anticipates a philosophy and philosophy is but an elucidated experience.

Marxism, rather than an affirmation of a future that is necessary, is much more a judgment of the present as contradictory and intolerable.

It is absolutely necessary to go back, to return to Freud.

Expressing what exists is an endless task.

Philosophy is not the passage from a confused world to a universe of closed significations. On the contrary, philosophy begins with the awareness of a world which consumes and destroys our established significations but also renews and purifies them.

There is a fitting together of different perspectival views; there is no fitting together of all of them in an absolute knowledge which is completely decentered and final...The passage from the particular to the universal is never finished.

Someone will say: you explain nothing, you observe. But to explain is always: to bring Nature back to God or to bring it back to the spectacle of man—not to see nature. In reality, what one has to learn is that being is that,it is precisely not to explain.

Meaning is like spots of light surrounded by rugged clouds of night, glowing islands.

Man is an historical idea, not a natural species.

Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us and so on without end, and language is not like a prison we are locked into or a guide we must blindly follow; for what these linguistic gestures mean and gain us such complete access to that we seem to have no further need of them to refer to it finally appears at the intersection of all of them.

Discoveries' in philosophy are always at the same time inventions...Truth is not ready-made in things, and yet, by a 'retrograde movement,' it presents itself to us as existing prior to our act of knowledge. We encounter reality: that is the cause and effect of the knowledge we have of it. This circle is the definition of history, and it is up to the philosopher to learn to live with it.

In the last analysis each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

We must stop thinking in terms of causality. Or again we must admit that we are dealing with a webbed causality and not a linear causality.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

The essences by necessity will not be the "answer" philosophy calls for, any more than are the facts. The "answer" is higher than the "facts," lower than the "essences," in the wild Being where they were, and—behind or beneath the cleavages of our acquired culture—continue to be, undivided.

Philosophy seeks to be philosophy while remaining non-philosophy, i.e. a 'negative philosophy' (in the sense of 'negative theology'). 'Negative philosophy' has access to the absolute, not as 'beyond,' as a positive second order, but another order which must be on this side, the double, inaccessible without being passed through. True philosophy scoffs at philosophy; true philosophy is a-philosophical. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel

The unconscious is not a second consciousness, but a nonthematized lived experience.

It is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a Communist.

Originary perception is a non-thetic, pre-objective, and preconscious experience.

Reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present.