Quotes About Perception

I found in the experience of the perceived world a new type of relation between the mind and truth...We experience in it a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.

Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities.

Circularity--a dangerous word. Circularity of Heraclitus, yes: to go in one direction is truly to go in the other. A thick identity there, which truly contains difference.

There is no absolute 'in-itself,' and no absolute 'for us'—for the same reasons, i.e., their reciprocal relativization, their 'mutual coincidence.' -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The contact with the perceived is not ignorance and is not knowledge.

True philosophy does not go 'behind:' behind the 'appearance' and behind what is in the world. Philosophy cannot conceive the absolute except as the other side of the 'appearance' or the phenomenon. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Our glances are not "acts of consciousness," each of which claims an invariable priority, but openings of our flesh which are immediately filled by the universal flesh of the world.

Perception teaches us an ontology that it alone can reveal to us.

No more than the sky or the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a logical possibility of conception, or a system of 'potentiality of consciousness': it is a new type of being, a being by porosity, or by generality, and the one before whom the horizon opens is caught up, englobed, within it.

Each perception is a vibration of the world, it touches well beyond what it touches, it awakens echoes in all my being in the world, it is super-significant.

Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. "Nature is on the inside," says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.

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?

We experience a perception and its horizon "in action" rather than by "posing" them or explicitly "knowing" them.

Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not an object at all; it is not really set out in front of us. It is our soil — not what is in front of us, facing us, but rather, that which carries us.

The thing offers itself as preliminary, primordial, anterior to all perception, like a landscape that is there before us and just as we will see it afterward...But at the same time, I can posit this universe anterior to me only as I perceive it...Bergson thus posits consciously a paradox inherent to perception: Being is anterior to perception, and this primordial Being is conceivable only in relation to perception.

Love cannot be given a name by the lover who lives it...If we are situated, then we are surrounded and cannot be transparent to ourselves, and thus our contact with ourselves must only be accomplished in ambiguity.

The body schema is not perceived--It is the norm or privileged position in contrast to which the perceived body is defined. It is prior to explicit perception.

The structure of behavior is neither thing nor consciousness, and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind.

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.

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

Time and space are horizons and not series of things. And horizons that overlap, one over the other. I read time in space and read space in time. A single great differentiation of a single Being.

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.

To be conscious is, among other things, to be somewhere else.