Phenomenology of Perception
“Each object is the mirror of all of the others. While I watch the lamp in my table, I feature to it not merely the qualities that are visible from my location, but also those who the fireplace, the walls, and the dining table may’see.’ The back of my lamp is merely the face that it’shows’ to the fireplace. Therefore, I can see 1 object insofar insofar as the others form a system or a planet, and insofar as each of these arouses the others round itself like audiences of its hidden facets and as the guarantee of their permanence. Each action of seeing that I perform is immediately reiterated among all the items of the planet that celebrity grasped as coexistent because each object just is that the others’see’ of it. . .the house itself is not the home seen from nowherebut instead the house seen from everywhere.”
“If it is true that I’m aware of my body through the world and if my body is your unperceived term in the middle of the planet toward which every object turns its surface, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of this world.”
“This dialogue between the topic and the object, where the topic takes the sense scattered throughout the object and the object gathers together the topic’s goals, namely, physiognomic perception, arranges a globe round the topic that speaks to him about the subject of himself and puts his own thoughts on earth.”
“I’m not facing my body, I am in it rather I am it… If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of an individual’s own body, we shall need to mention that it interprets itself.”
“We find beneath intelligence and under perception a more basic function. . .The core purpose we’re speaking of this prior to making us know things — more covertly brings them into existence for us. .
“We must not state that our body is in space, nor for that matter punctually. It inhabits time and space…I’m not in distance and in time, nor do I think space and time; instead, I’m of distance and time; my body fits itself to them and disturbs them. The scope of this hold steps the scope of y presence ; however, it can never be total. The space and time I occupy are constantly surrounded by indeterminate horizons which contain additional points of view. The synthesis of time, such as that of distance, is always to be started over again. The motor experience of our body is not a particular instance of knowledge; instead, it provides us a manner of reaching the entire world and the object, a’praktognosia’, which must be recognized as original, and perhaps originary.
“As a method of engine forces or perceptual powers, our body isn’t an object for the’I believe’: it’s a totality of lived significations that moved toward its balance.”
“Take an upset or a threatening gesture…I don’t perceive the anger or the threat as a mental fact hidden behind the gesture, I read the anger in the gesture. The gesture does not make me think of anger, but it’s anger itself. . .Everything occurs as if another individual’s intention inhabited my body, or like my intention inhabited his body… I know the other person within my entire body, just as I perceive’things’ through my body.”
“There’s nothing to be seen outside our horizons, but other arenas and other horizons, and nothing inside the item but other smaller things.”
“My hold on the past and the future is shaky and my ownership of my own time is constantly postponed until a point when I could fully understand that, yet this stage can’t ever be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its own future, and requiring at its own turn, further developments in order to be understood.”
“We started off from a world in itself that depended on our eyes so as to induce us to see this, and today we have consciousness of, or thought about the world, but the essence of earth remains unchanged; it’s still characterized by the absolute mutual exteriority of its parts, and is only duplicated through its scope by a idea which sustains it”
“Your system will draw to itself the intentional threads that bind it to its surroundings and eventually will show to the perceiving subject as the sensed world.”
“The purpose [of goal thinking] would be to decrease all phenomena that bear witness to the union of subject and earth, placing in their place the very clear idea of the thing as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links that unite the thing along with also the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to compose our planet (to the exception of the modes of look which we’ve explained ), and rather visual qualities, because these provide the impression of being autonomous, and because they are not as directly connected to our body and also present us with a thing rather than introducing us into a feeling. However, in fact everything are concretions of a setting, and some other explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of an earlier communication with a specific atmosphere.”