Phenomenology Quotes

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.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

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.

Thus "phenomenology" means αποφαινεσθαι τα φαινομενα -- to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.

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

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.

The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness.

To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified, is what we shall have to deal with first of all.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.

I believe we should really take our own phenomenology more seriously. What a good theory of conscious must explain is the variance in this subjective sense of realness: There clearly is a phenomenology of "hyperrealness", for example during religious experiences or under the influence of certain psychoactive substances.

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

By following "the path of reverie"-a constantly downhill path-consciousness relaxes and wanders-and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to "do phenomenology."

Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.