Quotes About Phenomenology

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love cannot be given a name by the lover who lives it...If we are situated, then we are surrounded and cannot be transparent to ourselves, and thus our contact with ourselves must only be accomplished in ambiguity.

The structure of behavior is neither thing nor consciousness, and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind.

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.

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.

The inside is seen in the outside--grasps it better than itself. Relation to the outside that is not 'representation' but ecstasy...And reciprocally, the visible is the transactions, the chemistry, the music, and interrelationship and the 'operation of interests' [Claudel] of Anima.

Obscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety,

Silent speech through which the thing dengt and the world Weltet .

The body is not comprehensible in the actual.

The world is a mass without gaps, an organism of colors across which the receding perspective, the contours, the angles, and the curves are set up as lines of force; the spatial frame is constituted by vibrating.

Se demander si le monde et réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

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 perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.

The universal is not the concept but this perception given in flesh and blood.

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

The universe of thought, like that of perception, is lacunary and baroque in itself.