Quotes About Nature

Evolution, life, physis, appear here as enveloping with regard to 'consciousness' of human knowledge.

Nature gives us a dispersed finality. It is a demonology, full of supranatural forces, not one of which is supernatural. On this terrain of knowledge, one must be polytheist.

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.

Nature starts from the unknowable and finishes consciously. Inversely, art starts from certain conscious thoughts and finishes in something that can be perpetually taken up again. Art attains the Absolute because at that moment consciousness attains the unconscious.

What lives in Nature is not mind or spirit, but rather the beginning of meaning in the process of ordering itself, but which has not fully emerged. The subject has to intervene in order to bring meaning out fully, but this disengagement of meaning is not constituting.

We are the parents of a Nature of which we are also the children

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.

Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not an object at all; it is not really set out in front of us. It is our soil — not what is in front of us, facing us, but rather, that which carries us.

There is a ti,e inherent to Nature. This time, in Whitehead, is inherent to the things, it embaces us, to the extent that we participate in the things, or that we take part in the process of Nature. It is essential for us, but insofar as we are Nature. Subjectivity is caught up in the system of a cosmic time, in a subjectivity of Nature.

If Nature is not an object of thought, that is, a simple correlate of a thought, it is decidedly not a subject either, and for the same reason: its opacity, its enveloping. It is an obscure principle.

In each visible, all of the visible...Overlapping, total part--no break between Nature and humanity.

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.

If we want to understand the process of Nature in itself, we could say that Nature is the memory of the world.

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.

Just as there is an Ineinander of life and physiochemistry, i.e., the realization of life as a fold or a singularity of physiochemistry--or structure, so to is the human to be taken in the Ineinander with animality and Nature.

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 essence, likewise, is an inner framework, it is not above the sensible world, it is beneath, or in its depth, its thickness. It is the secret bond...things are Essences at the level of Nature.

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

Heraclitus says that Nature is a child at play; it gives meaning, but in the manner of a child who is playing, and this meaning is never total.

Nature is what has a meaning, without this meaning being posited by thought: it is the autoproduction of meaning.

Nature is the primordial--that is, the nonconstructed, the noninstituted; hence the idea of an eternity of nature (the eternal return), of a solidity. Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not an object at all; it is not really set out in front of us. It is our soil --not what is in front of us, facing us, but rather, that which carries us.

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.

Someone will say: you explain nothing, you observe. But to explain is always: to bring Nature back to God or to bring it back to the spectacle of man—not to see nature. In reality, what one has to learn is that being is that,it is precisely not to explain.

The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul – the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun.