Quotes About Philosophy

There is a preparation for phenomenology in the natural attitude. It is the natural attitude which, by reiterating its own procedures, seesaws in phenpmenology. It is the natural attitude which goes beyond itself in phenomenology--and so it does not go beyond itself. Reciprocally, the transcendental attitude is still and in spite of everything 'natural.

The 'associations' of psychoanalysis are in reality 'rays' of time and of the world.

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.

Every sensation is already pregnant with a sense.

In the last analysis, phenomenology is neither a materialism nor a philosophy of mind. It's proper work is to unveil the pre-theoretical layer on which both of these idealizations find their relative justification and are gone beyond.

The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire "work" is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences.. . .

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense.

Anglo-American analytic philosophy is a deliberate retreat into a universe of thought where contingency, ambiguity, and the concrete have no place.

It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world an 'ever new' and 'always the same'--A sort of time of sleep. The sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other. Existential eternity. The indestructible, the barbaric Principle. Do a psychoanalysys of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother. A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology.

Sedimentation is: trace of the forgotten and thereby a call to thought which depends upon itself and goes farther...It is the experience of a resumption which is not totalization, and which precisely for that reason is able to open another development of knowledge.

Melanie Klein had distinguished the concept of ambivalence from that of ambiguity. Ambivalence is where the subject makes two alternative images for the same being; alternatives that are not seen as representing the same object. Ambiguity is an adult concept. The subject perceives two images, but he knows that they apply to the same object.

We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon.

According to Hegel, one attains the absolute by way of a phenomenology (the appearance of mind; mind in the phenomenon). This is not because the phenomenal mind is on one level of a scale, after which one moves on to the absolute, but because the absolute would not be absolute if it did not appear as absolute. Phenomenology is the whole truth from a certain point of view.

We must define 'organism' as everything that has defined norms, an a priori that governs what happens.

Philosophy turns towards the anonymous symbolic activity from which we emerge, and towards the personal discourse which develops in us, and which, indeed, we are.

The derangement of the senses is to break through the partitions between them in order to regain their indivision--And through this, a thought not mine but theirs...Things speak through me.

The perceived world is a world where there is discontinuity, where there is probability and generality, where each being is not constrained to a unique and fixed location, to an absolute density of being.

Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity.

Ambiguity is essential to human existence, and everything we live or think always has several senses.

Perceived causality is evidently not that of the scientist (i.e. the relation of a function to certain variables), but rather a productive and quasi-magical causality.

The limping of philosophy is its virtue. True irony is not an alibi; it is a task; and the very detachment of the philosopher assigns to him a certain kind of action among men.

In principle, the logician is only familiar with thetic consciousness.

Immanence is transcendence that has cooled down.

The incompleteness of the reduction is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being.