Great Throughts Treasury

"The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once."

"The function [of objective thinking] is to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite the thing and the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make up our world (to the exlusion of the modes of appearance which we have described), and preferably visual qualities, because these give the impression of being autonomous, and because they are less directly linked to our body and present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmosphere. But in reality all things are concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain atmosphere."

"The lemon is extended throughout its qualities, and each of its qualities is extended throughout each of the others. It is the sourness of the lemon, which is yellow; it is the yellow of the lemon, which is sour. We eat the color of a cake, and the taste of this cake, and the taste of this cake is the instrument, which reveals its shape and its color to what may be called the alimentary intuition."

"The number and richness of man?s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary."

"The objects, which haunt our dreams, are meaningful in the same way."

"The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence."

"The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being."

"The phenomenologist returns to the world which precedes [scientific description], [the world] of which science always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific characterization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as is geography to the countryside"

"The philosopher will ask himself? if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history."

"The real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent..."

"The relationship between perception and scientific knowledge is one of appearance to reality."

"The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis"

"The thing can never be separated from someone who perceives it; nor can it ever actually be in itself because its articulations are the very ones of our existence, and because it is posited at the end of a gaze or at the conclusion of a sensory exploration that invests it with humanity. To taking up or the achievement by us of an alien intention or inversely the accomplishment beyond our perceptual powers and as a coupling of our body wit the things."

"The unity of the object will remain a mystery for as long as we think of its various qualities (its color and taste, for example) as just so many data belonging to the entirely distinct worlds of sight, smell, touch and so on. Yet modern psychology, following Goethe?s lead, has observed that, rather than being absolutely separate, each of these qualities has an affective meaning, which establishes a correspondence between it and the qualities associated with the other senses."

"The work of a great novelist always rests on two or three philosophical ideas. For Stendhal, these are the notions of the Ego and Liberty; for Balzac, the mystery of history as the appearance of a meaning in chance events; for Proust, the way the past is involved in the present and the presence of times gone by. The function of the novelist is not to state these ideas thematically but to make them exist for us in the way that things exist. Stendhal's role is not to hold forth on subjectivity; it is enough that he make it present."

"The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities... There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness."

"The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.'"

"The world of perception consists not just of all natural objects but also of paintings, pieces of music, books and all that the Germans call the ?world of culture?."

"Then, as now, the way we experience works of cinema will be through perception."

"Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution."

"There is a perpetual uneasiness in the state of being conscious. At the moment I perceive a thing, I feel that it was there before me, outside my field of vision."

"There is no sphere of immanence, no realm in which my consciousness is fully at home and secure against all risk of error."

"Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it."

"This eternal love of Pierre and Francoise is nonetheless temporal."

"Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not ?a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.?"

"To tell the truth, there are cracks in this construction right from the start. Simone de Beauvoir points out some of them: the book starts with a sacrifice on the part of Francoise."

"True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest."

"Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man; man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself."

"We are nothing but a view of the world."

"We have discovered that it is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing."

"We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence."

"We pass from double vision to the single object, not through an inspection of the mind, but when the two eyes cease to function each on its own account and are used as a single organ by one single gaze. It is not the epistemological subject who brings about the synthesis, but the body."

"When I say that I have senses and that they give me access to the world, I am not the victim of some muddle... I merely express this truth which forces itself upon reflection taken as a whole: that I am able, being connatural with the world, to discover a sense in certain aspects of being without having myself endowed them with it through any constituting operation."

"When Sartre wrote that every work of art expresses a stand about the problems of human life (including political life ) , and when he recently tried to rediscover the vital decision through which Baudelaire arrived at the themes of his suffering and his poetry, the same Uneasiness or anger was apparent, this time among eminent authors."

"Whereas Catholic critics accuse Sartre of materialism, a Marxist like H. Lefebvre comes close to reproaching him with residual idealism."

"Yet I cannot detach someone from their silhouette, the tone of their voice and its accent. Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities."