Quotes About Existence

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.

In the horizon, there is no subject and object. We are there like the others; we are, like the others, drawn out of this horizonal being, divergences or variants in relation to it.

My organism--as a pre-personal adhesion to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence--plays the role of an innate complex beneath the level of my personal life. My organism is not like some inert thing, it itself sketches out the movement of existence.

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.

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

Personal existence is intermittent

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

There are several ways for the body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.

Each one can be, according to the moment, I or You or They....Insofar as we live in language, we are not only I; we haunt all grammatical persons, as we are at their intersection, at their crossroads, at their tuft.

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

The person himself must be understood as institution, not as consciousness of...

Taken concretely, man is not a psyche joined to an organism, but rather this back-and-forth of existence that sometimes allows itself to exist as a body and sometimes carries itself into personal acts. Psychological motives and bodily events can overlap because there is no single movement in a living body that is an absolute accident with regard to psychical intentions and no single psychical act that has not found at least its germ or its general outline in physiological dispositions.

Everything is offered up to a truth that is emergent and possessed by anyone. The delicate point is that this truth should be realized neither beyond the world, as it is by those who go to Mass, nor on this side of it, as it is for the Marxists.

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.

An expression and what it expresses strangely alternate and, through a sort of false recognition, make us feel that the word has inhabited the thing from all eternity...One of the effects of language is to efface itself to the extent that its expression comes across.

The phenomenon is not the object, nor is it the subject. It is not the object in that it concerns me: in presenting it, I understand myself. It is not the subject in that it still has to become for itself. The phenomenon is the hidden frame of 'subject' and 'object'—object returning to itself, subject outside of itself. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

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.

What dreams in us is our existential field.

The Wesen is sense of radiation, connected to materials, ingraspable outside of the fact or outside of existence. It is the way in which a whole is produced and reproduced, inseparable from this production. (verbal) Wesen

God is not known apart from experience, but we take hold of him in the finite.

The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind.

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

I found in the experience of the perceived world a new type of relation between the mind and truth...We experience in it a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.