Quotes About Phenomenology

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

Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness.

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.

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

philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with "word-meanings", it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.

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.

It belongs to the real to contract an infinity of relations into each of its moments.

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.

There is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place, and which is not simply nothing, even though it cannot be conveyed by a description.

The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat.

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

The generality of time, of a family of times, is derived from the fact that all these times are enveloped in a process of nature.

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.

The subject is not so much the intelligent subject as the desiring subject.

It is only withln the perceived world that we can understand that ail corporeality is already symbolism.

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 relation to the world, such as it tirelessly announces itself within us, is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice.

The abyss is not to be conceived of as lack of Being, but as more than 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.

The future must not be contained in the present, but neither is it something which would be added on to the present by an a tergo necessity. The future would come from the present itself. They would continue each other.

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.

The...present is itself a transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it was just there, one never coincides with it--It is not a segment of time with defined contours that would come and set itself in place. It is a cycle defined by a central and dominant region and with indecisive contours--a swelling or bulb of time...an institution, a system of equivalences.

Time is never completely constituted.