Quotes About Perception

The first exterior contact, the first exteroceptive stimulus, is the human voice.

It is a question not of putting the perceptual faith in place of reflection, but on the contrary of taking into account the total situation, which involves reference from the one to the other. What is given is not a massive and opaque world, or a universe of adequate thought; it is a reflection which turns back over the density of the world in order to clarify it, but which, coming second, reflects back to it only its own light.

We do not keep the world, or situations, or others at the length of our gaze like a spectacle; we are intermingled with them, drinking them in through all our pores.

The imaginary, said properly...is the carnal double, internal equivalent, secret figure of the real.

A perceived thing is... a certain variation in relation to a norm or to a spatial, temporal, or colored level, it is a certain distortion, a certain "coherent deformation" of the permanent links which unite us to sensorial fields and to a world.

There has to be an ideality which has need of time.

In each visible, all of the visible...Overlapping, total part--no break between Nature and humanity.

It is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing...Form and content – what is said and the way in which it is said – cannot exist separately from one another.

All vision, no matter what color it may be, is a kind of thoughtscreen (which allows for the overflowing of other thoughts)-- Vorhabe and sedimentation.

The inside is seen in the outside--grasps it better than itself. Relation to the outside that is not 'representation' but ecstasy...And reciprocally, the visible is the transactions, the chemistry, the music, and interrelationship and the 'operation of interests' [Claudel] of Anima.

Stimuli...are given to neural elaboration and translated into a linguistic system of the nervous system. Between the exterior world and the living organism, there is an insertion of a whole that orders, coordinates, and interprets: the nervous system is a mirror of the world...The higher animal thus constructs an Umwelt that has a Gegenwelt, a rejoinder in its nervous system.

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.

The objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body...which has merely a conceptual existence.

Silent speech through which the thing dengt and the world Weltet .

In between the microscopic facts, global reality is delineated like a watermark, never graspable for objectivizing-particularizing thinking, never eliminate from or reducible to the microscopic: we had only a bit of protoplasmic jelly, and we then have an embryo, by a transformation which, always too early or too late, we were never witness to in our investment in a biological field.

Painting...gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a "muscular sense" in order to possess the voluminosity of the world. This voracious vision, reaching beyond the "visual givens," opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house.

I feel the substance of my body escaping through my head and crossing the limits of my objective body when an ascending elevator stops abruptly.

The body is not comprehensible in the actual.

Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of y body is made explicit in the language of external perception.

The world is a mass without gaps, an organism of colors across which the receding perspective, the contours, the angles, and the curves are set up as lines of force; the spatial frame is constituted by vibrating.

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

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

The theory of the body schema is implicitly a theory of perception. We have learned to again sense our bodies; we have discovered, beneath objective and detached knowledge of the body, this other knowledge that we have of it because it is always with us and because we are bodies. It will be necessary to similarly awaken the experience of the world such as it appears to us insofar as we are in the world through our bodies, and insofar as we perceive the world with our bodies.