71 Quotes About Phenomenology

We live by a perceptual "map" which is never reality itself.

There is no truth that does not ultimately rest upon what is evident to us in our own experience.

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...

It does not come from the fact that women are naturally more able to perceive dirty laundry or that men are blind to housework but from the fact that perception has a social dimension and is shaped by the gendered division of labor: women perceive dirty socks more because they are the ones in charge of doing laundry.

There's a special phenomenology to walking in woods in winter.

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.

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosophermust "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciencesthat, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It mustarise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tendingtoward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer fromthe beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absoluteinsights.

This is what is meant by the phenomenology of the science-making process: Self-observation always leads us to an existential point about the metaphysics of experience, and it is almost always a transforming moment. (p. 286)

Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.