Quotes About Reality

The possible is the openness of the perceived world and not a system of logical Being in which we would be set up through idealization.

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

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

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory

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.

The trans-phenomenal reality of love would be, not that of a positive being who is without doubt, but that of...a lack...the other person as occupying the entire horizon of my life and not as a positive being. Love is the same thing as privation.

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

The world is nothing but world-as-meaning

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

The invisible is there without being an object, it is pure transcendence, without an ontic mask. And the 'visibles' themselves, in the last analysis, they too are only centered on a nucleus of absence.

Consciousness is not a good judge of what we are doing since we are involved in the struggle of history and in this we achieve more, less, or something else than we thought we were doing.

Our perception ends in objects, and the object, once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it that we had or that we could have.

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 form is a visible or sonorous configuration (or even a configuration which is prior to the distinction of the senses) in which the sensory value of each element is determined by its function in the whole and varies with it...This same notion of form will permit us to describe the mode of existence of the primitive objects of perception. They are lived as realities, we have said, rather than known as true objects.

We would not know even what the false is, if there were not times when we had distinguished it from the true...If we are to be able to speak of falsity, we do have to have experiences of truth.

Discoveries' in philosophy are always at the same time inventions...Truth is not ready-made in things, and yet, by a 'retrograde movement,' it presents itself to us as existing prior to our act of knowledge. We encounter reality: that is the cause and effect of the knowledge we have of it. This circle is the definition of history, and it is up to the philosopher to learn to live with it.

In the last analysis each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

We must stop thinking in terms of causality. Or again we must admit that we are dealing with a webbed causality and not a linear causality.

The The distinction between the real and the oneiric cannot be identical with the simple distinction between consciousness filled by meaning and consciousness given up to its own void. The two modalities impinge upon one another. Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the cleavage between the real and the imaginary.

The 'associations' of psychoanalysis are in reality 'rays' of time and of the world.

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense.

According to Hegel, one attains the absolute by way of a phenomenology (the appearance of mind; mind in the phenomenon). This is not because the phenomenal mind is on one level of a scale, after which one moves on to the absolute, but because the absolute would not be absolute if it did not appear as absolute. Phenomenology is the whole truth from a certain point of view.

I never rejoin the other's lived experience. It is in the world that we rejoin one another.

Perceived causality is evidently not that of the scientist (i.e. the relation of a function to certain variables), but rather a productive and quasi-magical causality.