Quotes About Perception

Originary perception is a non-thetic, pre-objective, and preconscious experience.

The 'unconscious'...is simply the pre-objective, oneiric background of all perception.

Reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present.

What there are, are totalities that 1) are not a fortuitous gathering of parts, 2) are not prior to all causal conditions. The totalities are exactly as perception offers them: imperfect and incomplete or less perfect totalities...Gestalten...The thing is...a hollow plenitude: presence, but absence. Its content is infinite, it is essential to it to present itself through adumbrations, therefore always to be beyond.

The 'associations' of psychoanalysis are in reality 'rays' of time and of the world.

Every sensation is already pregnant with a sense.

The unconscious is a perceiving consciousness... it operates as such through a logic of implication or promiscuity,

Memory is the irruption of other things in us.

The horizon is what, behind the thing, enables it to be a thing: gaps, ellipses, allusions to the sensible world, divergence, variation, difference of the 'world.

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense.

Perception...is not the confrontation of an ob-ject. The ob-ject only speaks to me laterally, i.e., it doesn't affect me frontally, but from the side by awakening complicity in me, its presence is obsessive because it is exogenous and endogenous . I.e., it "solicits me" (Valéry)...due to a kind of postural impregnation whereby I crystallized an entire order of nascent significations on this twig.

Every memory reopens lost time and invites us to again take up the situation that it evokes.

Sedimentation is: trace of the forgotten and thereby a call to thought which depends upon itself and goes farther...It is the experience of a resumption which is not totalization, and which precisely for that reason is able to open another development of knowledge.

Melanie Klein had distinguished the concept of ambivalence from that of ambiguity. Ambivalence is where the subject makes two alternative images for the same being; alternatives that are not seen as representing the same object. Ambiguity is an adult concept. The subject perceives two images, but he knows that they apply to the same object.

Consciousness of something is always consciousness of a difference between terms that are not given positively.

When Gestalt theory tells us that a figure against a background is the most basic sensible given we can have, this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception...Rather, this is the very definition of the perceptual phenomenon, or that without which a phenomenon cannot be called perception. The perceptual "something" is always in the middle of some other thing, it always belongs to a "field.

We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon.

According to Hegel, one attains the absolute by way of a phenomenology (the appearance of mind; mind in the phenomenon). This is not because the phenomenal mind is on one level of a scale, after which one moves on to the absolute, but because the absolute would not be absolute if it did not appear as absolute. Phenomenology is the whole truth from a certain point of view.

Bodily functions take place in a psychic dimension. The digestive tube not only serves for digestion, but is also a manner of entering into relationship with the world.

My clothes can become appendages of my body.

We must define 'organism' as everything that has defined norms, an a priori that governs what happens.

The visible has to be described as something that is realized through man, but which is nowise anthropology. Nature as the other side of man (as flesh--nowise as 'matter'). Logos also as what is realized in man, but nowise as his property.

The derangement of the senses is to break through the partitions between them in order to regain their indivision--And through this, a thought not mine but theirs...Things speak through me.

I never rejoin the other's lived experience. It is in the world that we rejoin one another.