Quotes About Embodiment

The world and I are within one another.

Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?

We situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, and at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become the world.

Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it.

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

We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it.

To say that I have a visual field means that I have an access and an opening to a system of visible beings through my position, and that they are available to my gaze in virtue of a kind of primordial contact and by a gift of nature, without any effort required on my part. In other words, it means that vision is pre-personal.

Consider an angry or a threatening gesture...I do not perceive the anger or the threat as a psychological fact hidden behind the gesture, I read the anger in the gesture. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself...Everything happens as if the other person's intention inhabited my body, or as if my intention inhabited his body...I understand the other person through my body, just as I perceive 'things' through my body.

If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another.

This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world.

We might say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself--or that the world is at the heart of our flesh.

Matter is 'pregnant' with its form.

The world and others become our flesh.

The body is the seat of a certain praxis, the point from which there is something to do in the world, the register in which we are inscribed and whose inscription we continue.

The nature in us must have some relation to Nature outside of us; moreover, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to us by the Nature that we are.

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.

I do not perceive simply "things" but also use-objects: an article of clothing, for example...Nerve functioning distributes not only spatial and chromatic values but also symbolic values.

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

Alg?m görsel, dokunsal ve i?itsel verilerin toplam? de?ildir. Bütün varl???mla, bütünlüklü bir ?ekilde alg?alr?m: Ayn? anda tüm duygular?ma konu?an biricik bir yap?y?, biricik bir varl?k biçimini kavrar?m.

The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind.

These clarifications allow us to understand motricity unequivocally as original intentionality. Consciousness is originally not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can.

Our glances are not "acts of consciousness," each of which claims an invariable priority, but openings of our flesh which are immediately filled by the universal flesh of the world.

Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. "Nature is on the inside," says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.

We experience a perception and its horizon "in action" rather than by "posing" them or explicitly "knowing" them.