Quotes About Existence

Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities.

Philosophy...is a question....The human being is a question for God himself. We are not masters of this question.

We are the parents of a Nature of which we are also the children

There is no absolute 'in-itself,' and no absolute 'for us'—for the same reasons, i.e., their reciprocal relativization, their 'mutual coincidence.' -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The contact with the perceived is not ignorance and is not knowledge.

True philosophy does not go 'behind:' behind the 'appearance' and behind what is in the world. Philosophy cannot conceive the absolute except as the other side of the 'appearance' or the phenomenon. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Verflechtung(interweaving, entanglement with others). Means finally: We are not one side of the wall but two. And finally: We are not perspectives upon a surveyor's plan (for then one would not understand substitution). We are two in one Being. Make a chapter in my book: Being and Memory (memory as a particular case of inter-being).

Perception teaches us an ontology that it alone can reveal to us.

No more than the sky or the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a logical possibility of conception, or a system of 'potentiality of consciousness': it is a new type of being, a being by porosity, or by generality, and the one before whom the horizon opens is caught up, englobed, within it.

The natural 'thing,' the organism, the behavior of others and my own behavior exist only by their meaning; but this meaning which springs forth in them is not yet a Kantian object; the intentional life which constitutes them is not yet a representation; and the 'comprehension' which gives access to them is not yet an intellection.

Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not an object at all; it is not really set out in front of us. It is our soil — not what is in front of us, facing us, but rather, that which carries us.

The thing offers itself as preliminary, primordial, anterior to all perception, like a landscape that is there before us and just as we will see it afterward...But at the same time, I can posit this universe anterior to me only as I perceive it...Bergson thus posits consciously a paradox inherent to perception: Being is anterior to perception, and this primordial Being is conceivable only in relation to perception.

In the movement of experience, which brings understanding, we reach the absolute which is not something behind it or under it, but which is a water-mark within it and which exists only as a water-mark. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

My possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive...in short, I am never at one with myself.

Time and space are horizons and not series of things. And horizons that overlap, one over the other. I read time in space and read space in time. A single great differentiation of a single Being.

To be conscious is, among other things, to be somewhere else.

We do not keep the world, or situations, or others at the length of our gaze like a spectacle; we are intermingled with them, drinking them in through all our pores.

The imaginary, said properly...is the carnal double, internal equivalent, secret figure of the real.

There has to be an ideality which has need of time.

It is not true that everything is actual; there is an actuality of the possible as possible, that is, the notion of an outline, the being of becoming actual that is certain possibilities.

In each visible, all of the visible...Overlapping, total part--no break between Nature and humanity.

Obscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety,

If we want to understand the process of Nature in itself, we could say that Nature is the memory of the world.

The objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body...which has merely a conceptual existence.