Quotes About Being

Rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.

The words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon Being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin.

But the spectacle perceived does not partake of pure being. Taken exactly as I see it, it is a moment of my individual history, and since sensation is a reconstitution, it pre-supposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution, so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder.

Activity = passivity.

We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot.

The whole architecture of the notions of psychology... as differentiations of one sole and massive adhesion to being which is the flesh ...There is no hierarchy of orders of layers or planes, there is dimensionality of every fact & facticity of every dimension.

If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it.

To think is not having but not having.

This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself.

Being is not given but rather emerges over time.

I am, as a sensing subject, full of natural powers of which I am the first to be filled with wonder. Thus I am not, to recall Hegel's phrase, a 'hole in being,' but rather a hollow, or a fold that was made and that can be unmade.

There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal.

The specular thing-image, or thing-'mental image' chiasm: imagination inherent to each subfield of this sense. The imaginary deploys itself in this field—which is therefore carnal. The imaginary: decentering of the sensible. The concept: decentering of the imaginary. Me-world Chiasm: the things gaze upon me. I gaze upon myself (through the eyes of the things). The chiasm is the idea of Being as the elevation of the relative to the Absolute by means of the diaphragm and the 'there is.

Phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its "conditions of possibility," but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world.

For us the essential is to know precisely what the being of the world means. Here we must presuppose nothing—neither the naïve idea of being in itself, therefore, nor the correlative idea of a being of representation, of a being for the consciousness, of a being for man: these, along with the being of the world, are all notions that we have to rethink with regard to our experience of the world.

Is this the highest point of reason, to realize that the soil beneath our feet is shifting, to pompously name 'interrogation' what is only a persistent state of stupor, to call 'research' or 'quest' what is only trudging in a circle, to call 'Being' that which never fully is?

There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories.

What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light.

We are already in the being thus described, that we are of it, that between it and us there is Einfühlung. That means that my body is made of the same flesh as the world, and moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation of mutual transgression or of overlapping.

What is given is the metamorphosis of brute being, the giving birth.

The body as the power of empathy is already desire, libido, projection - introjection, identification. The esthesiological structure of the human body is thus a libidinal structure, the perception of a mode of desire, a relation of being and not of knowledge...What is the I of desire? It is obviously the body,

The reduction no longer involves a return to ideal being, but brings us back to the spirit of Heraclitus, to an interweaving of horizons, to an open Being.

True nothingness is not the nothing that noths, but a something always on the horizon,the positive determinations of which are the trace and absence.

From the moment of conception and still more after birth, there is an encroachment towards a future which is made from itself, under certain given conditions, and which is not the act of a donation of sense. Birth is not an act of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act.