Quotes About Reality

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.

But where are these reference events and these landmarks themselves? They refer us to others, and the answer satisfies us only because we do not attend to it, because we think we are 'at home.' The question would arise again and indeed would be inexhaustible, almost insane, if we wished to situate our levels, measure our standards in their turn, if we were to ask: but where is the world itself? And why am I myself? Am I really alone to be me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?

Faith--in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified-enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal with the existing world. Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustibJe and our information limited.

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

One cannot even say that one believes in the perception of the real. Belief only intervenes after a preexisting doubt, and thus it is the imaginary that we truly believe in, because our beliefs lack some support. I do not believe in this chair I see: the chair is simply there, that is all. Perception does not await proof in order to grasp an object; it is prior to careful observation. In this sense, perception, like the imagination, precedes all premises.

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

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.

Thus, a nocturnal reality of the soul, of the incorporeal--which is not nothing--but which needs to 'adorn' itself with the visible--which is like the opposite of the visible--The visible opens onto an invisible that is its relief or its structure and where identity is rather non-difference.

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.

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

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.

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

The structure 'world,' with its double movement of sedimentation and spontaneity, is at the center of consciousness.

Everything is offered up to a truth that is emergent and possessed by anyone. The delicate point is that this truth should be realized neither beyond the world, as it is by those who go to Mass, nor on this side of it, as it is for the Marxists.

The sensible world is full of gaps, ellipses, allusions.

The phenomenon is not the object, nor is it the subject. It is not the object in that it concerns me: in presenting it, I understand myself. It is not the subject in that it still has to become for itself. The phenomenon is the hidden frame of 'subject' and 'object'—object returning to itself, subject outside of itself. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

This colored surface holds itself together; it does not receive its unity from our representation or from a representation of its own.

Thus the highest point of truth is still only perspective.

What dreams in us is our existential field.

God is not known apart from experience, but we take hold of him in the finite.