Quotes About Ontology

T]he world springs out of a want, out of privation, but it is false speculation to make this privation an ontological being.

The great tendency of all persons who study techniques is to make distinctions. They distinguish between the different elements of technique, maintaining some and discarding others. They distinguish between technique and the use to which it is put. These distinctions are completely invalid and show only that he who makes them has understood nothing of the technical phenomenon. Its parts are ontologically tied together; in it, use is inseparable from being.

Een vriend zegt dat gender voor hem net zoiets is als kleur. Gender en kleur delen een zekere ontologische onbepaaldheid: het klopt niet helemaal om te zeggen dat een voorwerp een kleur ís, noch om te zeggen dat het een kleur hééft. Ook de context verandert: 'alle katten zijn grijs', et cetera. Ook is kleur niet echt iets 'vrijwilligs'. Maar geen van deze formuleringen betekent dat het voorwerp in kwestie 'kleurloos' is.

In other studies, the philosophy is made explicit by a special section in the study—typically in the description of the characteristics of qualitative inquiry often found in the methods section. Here the inquirer talks about ontology, epistemology, and other assumptions explicitly and details how they are exemplified in the study. The

Subcreation is not just a desire, but a need and a right; it renews our vision and gives us new perspective and insight into ontological questions that might otherwise escape our notice within the default assumptions we make about reality.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.

To my mind, the chief conclusion to be drawn from Derrida's analysis is that the human-animal distinction is, strictly speaking, nonsensical. How could a simple (or even a highly refined) binary distinction approach doing justice to the complex ethical and ontological matters at stake here?

To name the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or even a non-dog.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent...

We situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, and at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become the world.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it.

Being is not given but rather emerges over time.

philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with "word-meanings", it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.

We might say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself--or that the world is at the heart of our flesh.

The generality of time, of a family of times, is derived from the fact that all these times are enveloped in a process of nature.

The abyss is not to be conceived of as lack of Being, but as more than Being.

True nothingness is not the nothing that noths, but a something always on the horizon,the positive determinations of which are the trace and absence.

From the moment of conception and still more after birth, there is an encroachment towards a future which is made from itself, under certain given conditions, and which is not the act of a donation of sense. Birth is not an act of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act.

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.

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.