Quotes About Perception

The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat.

Moonlight and sunlight in our memory are presented before all else, not as sensory contents, but as a certain type of symbiosis, a certain manner that the outside has of invading us, a certain manner that we have of receiving it.

Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.

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.

What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference.

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.

The subject is not so much the intelligent subject as the desiring subject.

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

The body as the power of empathy is already desire, libido, projection - introjection, identification. The esthesiological structure of the human body is thus a libidinal structure, the perception of a mode of desire, a relation of being and not of knowledge...What is the I of desire? It is obviously the body,

We would speak of nothing if it were only necessary to speak of that with which we coincide, since speech is already a separation. Moreover, there is no experience without speech, the purely lived is not even found within man's speaking life. But the primary sense of speech is, nevertheless, in this text of experience that it attempts to utter.

We only know what we are after we have lost it...Such is true nothingness, which is not nichtiges Nicht but Sein.

The world and others become our flesh.

The body is the seat of a certain praxis, the point from which there is something to do in the world, the register in which we are inscribed and whose inscription we continue.

The relation to the world, such as it tirelessly announces itself within us, is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice.

True philosophy entails relearning to see the world anew.

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.

The future must not be contained in the present, but neither is it something which would be added on to the present by an a tergo necessity. The future would come from the present itself. They would continue each other.

The nature in us must have some relation to Nature outside of us; moreover, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to us by the Nature that we are.

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.

Time is never completely constituted.

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.