Quotes About World

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no question of dissolving it through some 'solution,' it is beneath the level of solutions.

Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?

Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it.

There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.

The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoate style in which it proceeds are not the signs of failure; they were inevitable because phenomenology's task was to reveal the mystery of the world and the mystery of reason.

W)e must - precisely in order to see the world and to grasp it as a paradox - rupture our familiarity with it, and this rupture can teach us nothing except the unmotivated springing forth of the world.

From the moment we do something, we turn toward the world, stop self-questioning, and go beyond ourselves in our action. 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 inexhaustible and our information limited.

In modernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion. There is no knowing, moreover, whether a conclusion will ever be added.

Phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its "conditions of possibility," but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world.

From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in "stories" and, as it were, pointed at.

This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world.

And these open vortexes in the sonorous world finally form one sole vortex in which the ideas fit in with one another.

The Absolute is not only the Absolute, but also the dialectical movement of finite and infinite. The Absolute is such that it only ever appears to an other. Just as our intuition is an ek-stasis, by which we try to situate ourselves in the Absolute, so too must the Absolute leave itself and make itself in the world.

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.

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.

We are already in the being thus described, that we are of it, that between it and us there is Einfühlung. That means that my body is made of the same flesh as the world, and moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation of mutual transgression or of overlapping.

The 'invisible world': it is given originally as non-Urprasentierbar, as the other is in his body given originally as absent--as a divergence, as a transcendence.

The flesh...The wrapping of a body - object around itself...my body standing in front of the upright things, in a circuit with the world, an empathy with the world, with the things, with the animals, with other bodies...The flesh is the originary presentation of the unpresentable as such, the visibility of the invisible...In this arrangement of flesh, then, there appears or emerges a vision...by the arrangement of a hollow, by the irruption of a new field that comes from the interworld.

Animality is the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated meaning.

The body is a sensible thing, the movements of which form a...diacritical system...this system is the keystone of the world, or inversely, has the keystone in the world and opens onto the world.

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.

Perception, which is an event, opens onto the thing perceived, which appeared to be prior to perception and to be true before it. And if perception always reaffirms the preexistence of the world, it is precisely because it is an event, because the subject who perceives is already at grips with being through the perceptual fields, the "senses.

Signification arouses speech as the world arouses my body--by a mute presence which awakens my intentions without deploying itself before them. In me as well as in the listener who finds it in hearing me, the significative intention (even if it is subsequently to fructify in 'thoughts') is at the moment no more than a determinate gap to be filled by words--the excess of what I intend to say over what is being said or has already been said.