Great Throughts Treasury

"In this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other. Apart from the probing of my eye or my hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning."

"Inside and outside are inseparable."

"Intellectual works had always been concerned with establishing a certain attitude toward the world, of which literature and philosophy, like politics, are just different expressions; but only now had this concern become explicit."

"It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one ?to have his passion as a profession.?"

"It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness. If one looks at the work of other painters after seeing Cezanne's paintings, one feels somehow relaxed, just as conversations resumed after a period of mourning mask the absolute change and give back to the survivors their solidity."

"It is because we are through and through compounded of relationships with the world that for us the only way to become aware of the fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity...or yet again, to put it 'out of play'."

"It is clear from his conversations with Emile Bernard that Cezanne was always seeking to avoid the ready-made alternatives suggested to him: sensation versus judgment; the painter who sees against the painter who thinks ; nature versus composition ; primitivism as opposed to tradition."

"It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations."

"It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational."

"It means two things to say that our experience is our own: both that it is not the measure of al imaginable being in itself and that it is nonetheless co-extensive with al being of which we can form a notion. This double sense of the cogito is the basic fact of metaphysics: I am sure that there is being-on the condition that I do not seek another sort of being than being? for-me."

"It would be hard to deny that gestalt psychology overturns what could be called the implicit ontology of science and forces us to revise our conception of the conditions and limits of scientific knowledge for example, the ideal of an objective animal psychology."

"Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language - that is, the opportune recollection of a pre-established sign ? is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is, as Mallarm‚ said, the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary - speech which signifies, which finally renders l'absente de tous bouquets present and frees the sense captive in the thing - is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense."

"Language transcends us and yet we speak."

"Lastly, no matter if metaphysics conceived as system has clashed with scientism, as Bergson saw, there is much more than a concordat between a metaphysics which rejects system as a matter of principle and a science which is forever becoming more exact in measuring how much its formulas diverge from the facts they are supposed to express: there is a spontaneous convergence."

"Let us see what becomes of this distinction by examining a particular case. Imagine that I am in the presence of someone who, for one reason or another, is extremely annoyed with me. My interlocutor gets angry and I notice that he is expressing his anger by speaking aggressively, by gesticulating and shouting."

"Lichtenberg? held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it? It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was ?strange? (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations."

"Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense."

"Likewise, if we are to rediscover a system of morals, we must find it through contact with the conflicts revealed by immoralism."

"Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and ?gives the whole show away.? The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden."

"Marxism not only tolerates freedom and the individual but, as "materialism," even gives man a dizzying responsibility, as it were."

"Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence."

"My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood."

"My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think."

"Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world."

"Only when I discover the landscape hidden until then behind a hil does it fully become a about to, one cannot imagine what a thing would be like if it were not to, be seen by me."

"Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system."

"Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world."

"Particular mood emanates from each color, making it sad or happy? Each color is the equivalent of a particular sound or temperature."

"Perception is not a fact within the world, because perception is the capacity whereby there is a world it cannot be just another fact within the world. One cannot combine a conception of human perception as a natural fact with an acknowledgement of its special status as the root of the human understanding of the world."

"Perspective informed by ?phenomenology? is a philosophical method, which had been initiated at the start of the century by the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl."

"Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical discourse. But for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest. It is never content to accept its historical situation. It changes this situation by revealing it to itself."

"Precisely because man is ?transcendental?, in the sense that man is the being, which gives meaning to things, the ?psychological? understanding of man is the same time a ?philosophical? understanding of the meaning of things."

"Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire."

"Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always will be that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general - as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use."

"Science subjects the data of our experience to a form of analysis that we can never expect will be completed since there are no intrinsic limits to the process of observation: we could always envisage that it might be more thorough or more exact than it is at any given moment."

"Since Husserl?s phenomenological method was precisely motivated by a wish to set himself apart from the ?psychologism?, as he saw it, of his contemporaries, it would be ironic if Merleau-Ponty?s phenomenology turned out to be a form of pshychologism after all. But Merleau-Ponty anticipated this objection: his reply to it is that the alternatives ?psychological? and ?philosophical? are not exclusive."

"Since the beginning of the century many great books have expressed the revolt of life's immediacy against reason. Each in its own way has said that the rational arrangement of Ii system of morals or politics, or even of art, is valueless in the face of the fervor of the moment, the explosive brilliance of an individual life, the "premeditation of the unknown.""

"So the process of looking at human beings form the outside ? that is, at other people ? leads us to reassess a number of distinctions which once seemed to hold good such as that between mind and body."

"Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it."

"Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man."

"Suffice it to say that even when painters are working with real objects, their aim is never to evoke the object itself, but to create on the canvas a spectacle, which is sufficient unto it."

"Taken together, all these factors contribute to form a particular overall cinematographical rhythm."

"The body is our general medium for having a world."

"The certainties of common sense and natural attitude to things... being the presupposed basis of any thought, they are taken for granted, and go unnoticed, and because in order to arouse them and bring them to view, we have to suspend for a moment our recognition of them."

"The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him."

"The creators of the future, just like those of today, will still have to discover new relationships without being guided to them; then, as now, the viewer will experience the unity and necessity of the temporal progression in a work of beauty without ever forming a clear idea of it."

"The eidetic method is the method of a phenomenological positivism which bases the possible on the real."

"The eidetic reduction is, on the other hand, the determination to bring the world to light as it is before any falling back on ourselves has occurred, it is the ambition to make reflection emulate the unreflective life of consciousness."

"The essential point is clearly to grasp the project towards the world that we are."

"The flesh is at the heart of the world."