Quotes About Consciousness

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.

Not only parallel problems: vision and its signification, speech and its signification--but a single problem: the visible and poetic signified are intertwined; poetry, speech of things (Valéry)... This is not to lose interest in the world; it is to find access through intermixing, through an imaginary within us that welcomes it and makes it at home. In a sense, it discovers it.

Scientific points of view are always both naïve and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted without explicitly mentioning it, that other point of view, namely that of the consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself around me and begins to exist for me.

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.

Time is not a line, but rather a network of intentionalities.

Psychological reflection, however, obliges us to place the precise world back into its cradle of consciousness, to ask ourselves how the very idea of the precise world or of precise truth is possible, and to seek out its first springing forth into consciousness. (...) Consciousness must be brought face to face with its unreflective life in things and must awaken to its own, forgotten, history - this is the true role of philosophical reflection.

In the horizon, there is no subject and object. We are there like the others; we are, like the others, drawn out of this horizonal being, divergences or variants in relation to it.

There is a self-knowledge that is not knowledge and is not self-consciousness; there is a presence of the past that is not in fact given in it, but also not what I will in the instant; and there is a doing that is not the fiat of a closed signification.

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

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.

Institution...is neither perceived nor thought as a concept. It is the wherewithal on which I count at eh moment, which is seen nowhere and is assumed by everything that is visible for a human beimg, it is what is at issue each moment and which has no name and no identity in our theories of consciousness.

The Umwelt is less and less oriented toward a goal and more and more toward the interpretation of symbols.

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.

The living physiology of the nervous system can only be understood by starting from phenomenal givens.

Trace: presence of an absent: experience of an absence.

A determinate emptiness: a lack, a privation, a dimension (new type of intellectual existence).

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

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

A pre-self, a latent ego that remains in ignorance of itself, because it has not yet encountered in others a limit to the self.

Existence turning back upon itself but without succeeding in carrying itself away.

The unthought can only appear through contact.