Quotes About Consciousness

I can never say 'I' absolutely.

Deepen the notion of gnosia through that of praxia. It's a matter of grasping mind in its nascent state.

Every act of reflection, every voluntary taking up of a position is established against the background and upon the proposition of a pre-personal life of consciousness.

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.

As the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other's are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.

Are the limits between the ''inside'' and the "outside" so clear?

We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either in us or in it.

Superficial conceptualizations, positivist determinations of a great truth: there is the id as perception that is imperception, nonconventional thought (and not hidden adequate thought); there is the ego, the perception-consciousness apparatus, like a system of attitudes which avoid, bypass the id--(without going so far as to be consciousness of the unconscious).

We are not spectators of a closed history; we are actors in an open history, our praxis introduces the element of construction rather than knowledge as an ingredient of the world, making the world not simply an object of contemplation but something to be transformed. What we cannot imagine is a consciousness without a future and a history with an end. Thus, as long as there are men, the future will be open and there will only be a probabilistic calculation and no absolute knowledge.

Perception grounds everything because it shows us, so to speak, an obsessional relation with being; it is there before us, and yet it touches us from within.

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

When I am seated at my table, I can instantly 'visualize' the parts of my body that it conceals from me. As I clench my foot inside my shoe, I can see it. I have this power even for parts of my body that I have never seen.

Self and other are not two distinct substances...We are both, other and self, two variables of the same system.

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

We cannot say at what moment the decision is taken: it is always to be taken or already taken.

The positive and the negative are the two 'sides' of a Being; in the vertical world, every being has this structure (To this structure is bound the ambiguity of the consciousness...of imperception in perception...). Against the doctrine of contradiction, absolute negation, the either or--Transcendence is identity within difference.

What makes the weight, the density, the flesh of each color, each sound, each tactile texture, of the present and the world is that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them, that he is the sensible coming to itself and that in return the sensible is to his eyes lime the double or an expression of his flesh.

Each field is a dimension, and Being is dimensionality itself.

It is true that we discover the unreflected. But the unreflected we go back to is not that which is prior to philosophy or prior to reflection. It is the unreflected which is understood and conquered by reflection.

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

The world is nothing but world-as-meaning

In a body activity like language, there is a blind logic, laws of equilibrium that are observed by the community of speaking subjects without any of them being conscious of it.

As a system of motor powers or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an 'I think': it is a totality of lived significations that moved toward it's equilibrium.

I do not think the world in the act of perception: it organizes itself in front of me.