Quotes About Being

Thus the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being; or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there. The fact is that sensible being, which is announced to me in my strictly private life, summons up within that life all other corporeality - It is the being which reaches me in my most secret parts, but which I also reach in its brute or untamed state, in an absolute of presence which holds the secret of the world , others, and what is true.

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.

1. Nature possesses a temporal character: it passes, like time. 2. Nature is only ever process: we only ever grasp it in its manifestations, without these manifestations ever exhausting it. 3. It is essential for Nature to pass. There is not Nature on the one hand, and its process as attribute on the other. Nature is pure process. It is comparable to the being of a wave, the reality of which is only global and not fragmentary.

Our open and personal existence rests upon an initial foundation of acquired and congealed existence.

Painting...gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a "muscular sense" in order to possess the voluminosity of the world. This voracious vision, reaching beyond the "visual givens," opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house.

We can elaborate a valid concept of Nature only if we find something at the jointure of Being and Nothingness. Despite what Bergson says, there is a kinship between the concept of Nature and radical contingency. In order to elaborate this concept, we have to leave positivism or negativism, which maintains a separation between the objective and the subjective, and which thus makes impossible the subjective-objective that Nature will always be.

There is a paradox here: the paradox of a total being which is, in advance, everything which we can be and do, and yet which would not be it without us, and which thus needs to be augmented by our own being. Our relation with being involves a double sense, the first according to which we belong to it, the second according to which it belongs to us.

What resists phenomenology within us -- natural being, the 'barbarous' source that Schelling spoke of -- cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it.

The possible is the openness of the perceived world and not a system of logical Being in which we would be set up through idealization.

Psychoanalysis: either the last conquest of scientific and techinitionist ontology or the rediscovery of another contact with being: being that is neither for itself, nor being object, but the contradictory being of human desire.

We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either in us or in it.

If to do philosophy is to discover the primary sense of being, then one does not philosophize in quitting the human situation; it is necessary rather to plunge into it. The absolute knowledge of the philosopher is perception.

Perception grounds everything because it shows us, so to speak, an obsessional relation with being; it is there before us, and yet it touches us from within.

Nature resists. It cannot be entirely established in front of us. The body is a nature at work within us.

The idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of.

The positive and the negative are the two 'sides' of a Being; in the vertical world, every being has this structure (To this structure is bound the ambiguity of the consciousness...of imperception in perception...). Against the doctrine of contradiction, absolute negation, the either or--Transcendence is identity within difference.

The trans-phenomenal reality of love would be, not that of a positive being who is without doubt, but that of...a lack...the other person as occupying the entire horizon of my life and not as a positive being. Love is the same thing as privation.

Each field is a dimension, and Being is dimensionality itself.

Perception is not first a perception of things<.i>, but a perception of elements<.i> (water, air...) of rays of the world , of things which are dimensions, which are worlds, I slip on these 'elements' and here I am in the world , I slip from the 'subjective' to Being.

The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not sunstance. To designate it, we should need the old term "element," in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an "element" of Being.

Our ideas, however limited they may be at a given moment—since they always express our contact with being and with culture—are capable of being true provided we keep them open to the field of nature and culture which they must express. And this possibility is always open to us, just because we are temporal.

Inasmuch as there is figure, there is also inarticulate background, inasmuch as we have being (figure), we don't have it, and inasmuch as we don't have it (background), inasmuch as we let it be without thinking about it, that's when we have it.

Expressing what exists is an endless task.

My body, which is one of the visibles, sees itself also and thereby makes itself the natural light opening its own interior to the visible, in order for the visible there to become my own landscape, realizing (as it is said) the miraculous promotion of Being to "consciousness," or (as we prefer to say) the segregation of the "within" and the "without