{"quotes":[{"text":"Only after the concept of knowledge has been based on an ontological relation [*Seinsverhältnis*] can we work out the particular kind of being from which the principle of immanence-to-consciousness (the starting point of Idealism and Critical Realism) mistakenly proceeds as though from a primary insight. This is the being of 'being-conscious' [*Bewusst-Seins*]. All being-conscious must first of all be brought under the higher concept of ideal being, or, at all events, that of irreal being. The mental item which presents itself in the experiences of consciousness may be real; being-conscious itself never is. However, the concept of consciousness is derivative in not only this sense. Consciousness also presupposes the concept of knowledge. Nothing is more misleading than to proceed in the opposite direction and define knowledge itself as simply a particular 'content of consciousness,' as we see if we oppose, to the particular kind of knowing and having-known which we call consciousness, another kind of knowledge which precedes it and includes no form of being-conscious. We will call this knowledge *ecstatic* [*ekstatische*] knowledge. It is found quite clearly in animals, primitive people, children, and, further, in certain pathological and other abnormal and supra-normal states (e.G., in recovering from the effects of a drug). I have said elsewhere that the animal never relates to its environment as to an object but only *lives in it* [*es lebe nur 'in sie hinein*']. Its conduct with respect to the external world depends upon whether the latter satisfies its instinctive drives or denies them satisfaction. The animal experiences the surrounding world as resistances of various types. Hence, it is absolutely necessary to contest the principle (in Descartes, Franz Brentano, *et al*.) that every mental function and act is accompanied by an immediate knowledge of it. An even more highly contestable principle is that a relation to the self is an essential condition of all processes of knowledge. It is difficult to reproduce purely ecstatic knowledge in mature, civilized men, whether in memory, reverie, perception, thought, or empathetic identification with things, animals, or men; nonetheless, there is no doubt that in every perception and presentation of things and events we think that we grasp *the things-themselves*, not mere 'images' of them or representatives of some sort.Knowledge first becomes conscious knowledge [*Bewusst-sein*], that is, comes out of its original ecstatic form of simply 'having' things, in which there is no knowledge of the having or of that through which and in which it is had, when the act of being thrown back on the self (probably only possible for men) comes into play. This act grows out of conspicuous resistances, clashes, and oppositions―in sum, out of pronounced suffering. It is the *actus re-flexivus* in which knowledge of the knowledge of things is added to the knowledge of things. Furthermore, in this act we come to know the kind of knowledge we have, for example, memory, ideation, and perception, and finally, beyond even these, we come to have a knowledge of the relation of the act performed to the self, to the knower. With respect to any specific relation to the self, this last knowledge, so-called conscious self-knowledge, comes only after knowledge about the act. Kant's principle that an 'I think' must be *able* to accompany all a man's thoughts may be correct. That it in fact always accompanies them is nevertheless undoubtedly false. However, the kind of being (indeed, of ideal being) which contents possess when they are reflexively *had* in their givenness in conscious acts―when, therefore, they become reflexive―is the being of being-consciously-known.'from_Idealism and Realism_.","author":"Max Scheler","tags":["epistemology","metaphysics","ontology","phenomenology","philosophy"],"id":452,"author_id":"Max+Scheler"},{"text":"We live by a perceptual 'map' which is never reality itself.","author":"Carl R. Rogers","tags":["perception","phenomenology","reality"],"id":8285,"author_id":"Carl+R.+Rogers"},{"text":"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.","author":"Maurice Merleau-Ponty","tags":["ethics","phenomenology","philosophy","speech","truth"],"id":9878,"author_id":"Maurice+Merleau-Ponty"},{"text":"Because they are assertions about Being in the light of time properly understood, all ontological propositions are Temporal propositions. It is only because ontological propositions are Temporal propositions that they can and must be *a priori propositions*. It is only because ontology is a Temporal science that something like the *a priori* appears in it. *A priori* means 'from the earlier' or 'the earlier.' '*Earlier*' is patently a *time-determination*. If we have been observant, it must have occurred to us that in our explications we employed no word more frequently than the expression 'already.' It 'already antecedently' lies at the ground: 'it must always already be understood beforehand': where beings are encountered, Being has 'already beforehand' been projected. In using all of these temporal, really Temporal, terms we have in mind something that the tradition since Plato calls the *a priori*, even if it may not use the very term itself. In the preface to his *Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft [Metaphysical principles of natural science], Kant says: 'Now to cognize something *a priori* means to cognize it from its mere possibility.' Consequently, *a priori* means that which makes beings as beings possible in *what* and *how* they are. But why is this possibility labeled by the term 'earlier'? Obviously not because we recognize it earlier than beings. For what we experience first and foremost is beings, that which is; we recognize Being only later or maybe even not at all. This time-determination 'earlier' cannot refer to the temporal order given by the common concept of time in the sense of intratemporality. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that a time determination is present in the concept of the *a priori*, the earlier. But, because it is not seen how the interpretation of Being necessarily occurs in the horizon of time, the effort has to be made to explain away the time determination by means of the *a priori*. Some go so far as to say that the *a priori*―the essentialities, the determination of beings in their Being―is extratemporal, supratemporal, timeless. That which does the enabling, the possibilities are characterized by a time-determination, the earlier, because in this *a priori* nothing of time is supposed to be present, hence *locus a non lucendo*? Believe it if you wish.'―from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_.","author":"Martin Heidegger","tags":["being","heidegger","metaphysics","ontology","phenomenology"],"id":10239,"author_id":"Martin+Heidegger"},{"text":"You can’t translate somethingthat was never in a languagein the first place.","author":"Chase Twichell","tags":["coda","experience","phenomenology"],"id":15636,"author_id":"Chase+Twichell"},{"text":"The ultimate truth is mystical truth, the ultimate reality is sacred chaos.","author":"Muzwot","tags":["activism","acyhetypes","anthropology","antropocene","biocentricism","celticism","dissent","eccentricism","ethnicity","ethnology","iconography","indigenous","mythology","paganism","paraphychology","phchophsical","phenomenology","symbology","transpersonal"],"id":22159,"author_id":"Muzwot"},{"text":"Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards a *truth in itself* in which the reason underlying all appearances is to be found. The tacit thesis of perception is that at every instant experience can be co-ordinated with that of the previous instant and that of the following, and my perspective with that of other consciousnesses—that all contradictions can be removed, that monadic and intersubjective experience is one unbroken text—that what is now indeterminate for me could become determinate for a more complete knowledge, which is as it were realized in advance in the thing, or rather which is the thing itself. Science has first been merely the sequel or amplification of the process which constitutes perceived things. Just as the thing is the invariant of all sensory fields and of all individual perceptual fields, so the scientific concept is the means of fixing and objectifying phenomena. Science defined a theoretical state of bodies not subject to the action of any force, and *ipso facto* defined force, reconstituting with the aid of these ideal components the processes actually observed. It established statistically the chemical properties of pure bodies, deducing from these those of empirical bodies, and seeming thus to hold the plan of creation or in any case to have found a reason immanent in the world. The notion of geometrical space, indifferent to its contents, that of pure movement which does not by itself affect the properties of the object, provided phenomena with a setting of inert existence in which each event could be related to physical conditions responsible for the changes occurring, and therefore contributed to this freezing of being which appeared to be the task of physics. In thus developing the concept of the thing, scientific knowledge was not aware that it was working on a presupposition. Precisely because perception, in its vital implications and prior to any theoretical thought, is presented as perception of a being, it was not considered necessary for reflection to undertake a genealogy of being, and it was therefore confined to seeking the conditions which make being possible. Even if one took account of the transformations of determinant consciousness, even if it were conceded that the constitution of the object is never completed, there was nothing to add to what science said of it; the natural object remained an ideal unity for us and, in the famous words of Lachelier, a network of general properties. It was no use denying any ontological value to the principles of science and leaving them with only a methodical value, for this reservation made no essential change as far as philosophy was concerned, since the sole conceivable being remained defined by scientific method. The living body, under these circumstances, could not escape the determinations which alone made the object into an object and without which it would have had no place in the system of experience. The value predicates which the reflecting judgment confers upon it had to be sustained, in being, by a foundation of physico-chemical properties. In ordinary experience we find a fittingness and a meaningful relationship between the gesture, the smile and the tone of a speaker. But this reciprocal relationship of expression which presents the human body as the outward manifestation of a certain manner of being-in-the-world, had, for mechanistic physiology, to be resolved into a series of causal relations.”—from_Phenomenology of Perception_. Translated by Colin Smith, pp. 62-64—Artwork by Cristian Boian.","author":"Maurice Merleau-Ponty","tags":["ontology","phenomenology","philosophy"],"id":24594,"author_id":"Maurice+Merleau-Ponty"},{"text":"The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being...","author":"David Zindell","tags":["dualism","phenomenology","spirituality"],"id":28793,"author_id":"David+Zindell"},{"text":"His face was neither handsome nor anything else. It just was.","author":"Tarjei Vesaas","tags":["existentialism","faces","impressions","masks","people","phenomenology","physiognomy"],"id":42013,"author_id":"Tarjei+Vesaas"},{"text":"We must listen to poets.","author":"Gaston Bachelard","tags":["89","phenomenology","poetry","poets"],"id":74654,"author_id":"Gaston+Bachelard"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":51,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}