Quotes About Understanding

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.

The person himself must be understood as institution, not as consciousness of...

The awareness of truth advances like a crab, turned towardits point of departure, toward that structure whose signification it expresses.

Pathological behavior also has meaning. Illness is auto-regulation, an establishment of an equilibrium to a level other than the normal one. It is not a totally incomprehensible one...The normal and the pathological can be considerably enriched by contact with one another.

But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.

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

Power is of the order of the tacit.

These clarifications allow us to understand motricity unequivocally as original intentionality. Consciousness is originally not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can.

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not "say" as by what it "says"? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?

In the movement of experience, which brings understanding, we reach the absolute which is not something behind it or under it, but which is a water-mark within it and which exists only as a water-mark. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The adoption of a level presupposes the expressive relation between the perceived and ourselves, presupposes our settling into it, that is to say, the raising of certain of its elements to the status of dimensions...The sensible thing speaks a certain language to us which we understand just as if a linguistic agreement were established between our perceptual system and it, as if we spoke its language without having learned it = expression.

My possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive...in short, I am never at one with myself.

Empathy makes it that there is "the one" and not "the same.

Until three months, the infant does not have the concept of his own body but only an impression of incompleteness.

In all dialogue there is an element of concrete universality.

Obscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety,

If we want to understand the process of Nature in itself, we could say that Nature is the memory of the world.

Se demander si le mode est réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

People would be very unhappy if they were to look closely at what lies beneath the words they use so readily. This is why they prefer, for the most part, not to do so.

All knowledge is established within the horizons opened up by perception.

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

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.

Far from being limited to the first years, language acquisition is coextensive with the very exercise of language.

Love is clairvoyant; it addresses us precisely to what is able to tear us apart.