Quotes About Perception

If objects must never show me more than one of their sides, then this is because I myself am in a certain place from which I can see them, but which I cannot see.

The perceived world is a world where there is discontinuity, where there is probability and generality, where each being is not constrained to a unique and fixed location, to an absolute density of being.

Since sane people find the insane impenetrable and irreducible, they consider themselves the sole owners of rationality.

The world is originally perceived as a total, if not complete, organization where effects are still bound up with causes before all intellectual representation...In perception causality is elucidated.

Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity.

Ambiguity is essential to human existence, and everything we live or think always has several senses.

Perceived causality is evidently not that of the scientist (i.e. the relation of a function to certain variables), but rather a productive and quasi-magical causality.

There is passivity right there in activity...And there is activity right there in passivity.

In principle, the logician is only familiar with thetic consciousness.

There is a world of silence, the perceived world, at least, is an order where there are non-language significations--yes, non-language significations, but they are not accordingly positive. There is for example no absolute flux of singular Erlebnisse; there are fields and a field of fields, with a style and a typicality...and which are always a relation between the agent (I can) and the sensorial or ideal field.

The phenomenal layer is, literally, pre-logical and will always remain so.

By returning to phenomena, we find, as a fundamental layer, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible sense.

Every perception is the perception of something solely by way of being at the same time the relative imperception of a horizon or background which it implies but does not thematize. Perceptual consciousness is therefore indirect or even inverted in relation to an ideal of adequation which it presumes but never encounters directly.

Immanence is transcendence that has cooled down.

The sensible order is being at a distance--the fulgurating attestation here and now to an inexhaustible richness.

The incompleteness of the reduction is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being.

Things are only half - opened before us, unveiled and hidden.

Perception is already expression.

Our assurance of being in the truth is one with our assurance of being in the world.

One cannot make a direct ontology. My 'indirect' method (being in the beings) is alone conformed with being--'negative philosophy' like 'negative theology.

There are eyes at the tips of my fingers.

As the thing, as the other, the true dawns through an emotional and almost carnal experience, where the "ideas"—the other's and our own—are rather traits of his physiognomy and of our own, are less understood than welcomed or spurned in love or hatred.

The child's consciousness is different from the adult's both in content and organization. Children are not, as previously thought, 'miniature adults.' Thus, contrary to the negative account, the child's consciousness is not identical to the adult's in everything except for its incompleteness and imperfection. The child possess another kind of equilibrium than the adult kind; therefore, we must treat the child's consciousness as a positive phenomenon.

Since perception itself is never complete, since ?ur perspectives give us a world to express and think about which envelopes and exceeds those perspectives, a world which announces itself in lightning signs as a spoken word or as an arabesque, why should the expression of the world be subjected to the prose of the senses or of the concept? It must be poetry; that is, it must completely awaken ?nd recall our sheer power of expressing beyond things already said or seen.