Quotes About Perception

Ambiguity cannot be resolved, but it can be understood as ultimate.

What makes the weight, the density, the flesh of each color, each sound, each tactile texture, of the present and the world is that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them, that he is the sensible coming to itself and that in return the sensible is to his eyes lime the double or an expression of his flesh.

Each field is a dimension, and Being is dimensionality itself.

Just as the speaking subject only understands and speaks as a possessor of a system of gesticulation defined by dimensions of variation, the subject that perceives movement can only do so inasmuch as he possesses the equivalences of a sort of natural language: that's what sensory fields are, given diacritical systems with use values and characteristic equivalences. But between these fields there are also equivalences, like a common language of these dialects.

It is true that we discover the unreflected. But the unreflected we go back to is not that which is prior to philosophy or prior to reflection. It is the unreflected which is understood and conquered by reflection.

Nature is what has a meaning, without this meaning being posited by thought: it is the autoproduction of meaning.

Perception is not first a perception of things<.i>, but a perception of elements<.i> (water, air...) of rays of the world , of things which are dimensions, which are worlds, I slip on these 'elements' and here I am in the world , I slip from the 'subjective' to Being.

Language functions with respect to thought as the body does with respect to perception...Some words only come forth in us when we have need of them...As an instrument, language is not like a hammer that has a limited number of uses. It is more like a piano, from which one can draw an infinite number of melodies.

Blind logic, logic which creates on the way.

The world is nothing but world-as-meaning

Experience anticipates a philosophy and philosophy is but an elucidated experience.

As a system of motor powers or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an 'I think': it is a totality of lived significations that moved toward it's equilibrium.

I do not think the world in the act of perception: it organizes itself in front of me.

The invisible is there without being an object, it is pure transcendence, without an ontic mask. And the 'visibles' themselves, in the last analysis, they too are only centered on a nucleus of absence.

Consciousness is not a good judge of what we are doing since we are involved in the struggle of history and in this we achieve more, less, or something else than we thought we were doing.

Inasmuch as there is figure, there is also inarticulate background, inasmuch as we have being (figure), we don't have it, and inasmuch as we don't have it (background), inasmuch as we let it be without thinking about it, that's when we have it.

Expressing what exists is an endless task.

Our perception ends in objects, and the object, once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it that we had or that we could have.

We shall render explicit the cohesion of the obverse and the reverse of my body which is responsible for the fact that my body—which is visible, tangible like a thing—acquires this view upon itself, this contact with itself, where it doubles itself up, unifies itself, in such a way that the objective body and the phenomenal body turn about one another or encroach upon one another.

Philosophy is not the passage from a confused world to a universe of closed significations. On the contrary, philosophy begins with the awareness of a world which consumes and destroys our established significations but also renews and purifies them.

There is a fitting together of different perspectival views; there is no fitting together of all of them in an absolute knowledge which is completely decentered and final...The passage from the particular to the universal is never finished.

Through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible.

Someone will say: you explain nothing, you observe. But to explain is always: to bring Nature back to God or to bring it back to the spectacle of man—not to see nature. In reality, what one has to learn is that being is that,it is precisely not to explain.

Objects form a system in which one object cannot appear without concealing others.