632 definitions
The book's index
Phenomenology of Perception
334 concepts · 632 definitions
- absence1
- abstract movement1
- absurd1
- action1
- actor1
- actress1
- adornment1
- affectivity1
- alienation1
- alter ego1
- ambiguity1
- analogy1
- anger1
- animism1
- anonymity1
- anorexia1
- anticipation1
- aphasia1
- artist1
- association1
- atmospheric sound1
- attention5
- avant-garde1
- battle1
- Being1
- being-in-the-world1
- bereavement1
- the bird1
- birth4
- black1
- blindness2
- blue1
- body26
- body image1
- book1
- bouquet1
- caress1
- certainty2
- chance2
- chatter1
- child2
- childhood3
- choice1
- circle1
- city1
- class2
- class-consciousness1
- cogito4
- color4
- communication2
- consciousness11
- contingency1
- creative deed2
- criminal1
- cube1
- The Cure1
Body (n.) is wherever there is something to be done.
Body (n.) is to be compared not to a physical object but to a work of art: a nexus of living meanings, not a law for a set of variables.
Body (n.) is in the world as the heart is in the organism, keeping the visible scene alive, breathing life into it and holding it up from within.
Body (n.) is the vehicle of being in the world: to have one is to be bound up with a setting and committed, continuously, to certain projects.
Perception (n.) of a thing ripens like a storm in storm clouds: walking toward a wrecked ship, I feel its look about to change — and suddenly the masts leave the forest and join the hull.
Perception (n.) when we merely look re-enacts the birth of intelligence: to see this tree as a tree, the scene must sketch it anew, as on the first day of the plant kingdom.
Perception (n.) is pinning one's faith at a stroke on a whole future of experiences, in a present that never strictly guarantees it.
Perception (n.) is not a science of the world, nor even an act; it is the background against which every act stands out.
Time (n.) as first lived is not a set of positions we pass through but a moving setting that recedes from us like the landscape from a train window — the crossing-keeper whisked by, the far hill barely moving.
Time (n.) is spoken of as a proper noun, sometimes personified, and rightly: it remains like a fountain, whose water changes while its form holds because there is one single thrust from source to jet.
Time (n.) is not for someone; time is someone — we must understand time as the subject and the subject as time.
Time (n.) is not a river: the metaphor survives from Heraclitus to now only because we smuggle a witness onto the bank.
Consciousness (n.) lives by positing objects, yet positing one absolute object would be its death, freezing the whole of existence the way a crystal dropped in a solution crystallizes it.
Consciousness (n.) is in the first place not a matter of "I think that" but of "I can".
Consciousness (n.) is always, in some measure, perceptual: beneath every idea lies a whole sedimentary history that shapes not only its origin but its meaning.
Consciousness (n.) is inner communication with the world, the body and other people — being with them rather than beside them.
Freedom (n.) is always a meeting of the inner and the outer: we choose our world and the world chooses us.
Freedom (n.) is a fate: it is my lot to be free, never reducible to anything I experience, always able to withdraw from any situation — sealed the moment I was born into the world.
Freedom (n.) in its concrete form is the general power of putting oneself into a situation; Schneider's every symptom comes down to being tied to the actual.
Freedom (n.) holds over sleep and sickness only to the extent that we stay involved in waking and health: it rests on our being in a situation and is itself a situation.
World (n.) is one vast individual from which my experiences are drawn, lingering at the edge of my life as a great city's distant roar underlies all we do there.
World (n.) is not a sum of things that might each be doubted but the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn — so asking whether it is real misunderstands the question.
World (n.) is not something I think but something I live through: open to it and in touch with it, I never possess it — it is inexhaustible.
World (n.) besieges subjectivity ceaselessly, as waves wash round a wreck on the shore.
Speech (n.) is the surplus of our existence over natural being.
Speech (n.) is as dumb as music, and music as eloquent as speech: all expression creates, and what it expresses never comes apart from it.
Speech (n.) does not translate a ready-made thought in the speaker; it accomplishes it.
Speech (n.) is clear only while we speak or listen: I say "I have been waiting a long time" or "he is dead" and know what I mean, yet questioned about time or death I find nothing clear in my mind.
Reflection (n.) is a system as closed as insanity — with the difference that it understands itself and the madman too, while the madman does not understand it.
Reflection (n.) draws on an unreflective fund of experience that is, for it, a kind of original past — a past that has never been a present.
Reflection (n.) does not retreat from the world into consciousness; it steps back to watch our ties to things fly up like sparks from a fire.
Reflection (n.) is truly reflection only when it knows itself as reflection on an unreflective life, and so as a change in the structure of our existence.
Past (n.) stays ours for good: once you have seen Van Gogh, all your later seeing is that of someone who knows Van Gogh, as a bourgeois turned workman stays a bourgeois-turned-workman.
Past (n.) I think I recapture is never the real past but my past as I see it now, perhaps after altering it.
Past (n.) is not the end of an event's being: in time, being and passing are synonymous, so by becoming past an event does not cease to be.
Past (n.) is not fate, but it has weight: an inferiority complex lived in for twenty years is no longer a series of events over there but the atmosphere of my present.
Thing (n.) is real precisely because it slips from our grasp: if we ever reached the thing itself, it would be laid out before us, stripped of mystery, and cease to be a thing.
Thing (n.) is a matter of where you look: if we saw the gaps between things as things, it would not be the same world rearranged but another world altogether.
Thing (n.) looked at with disinterested metaphysical attention, turns hostile and alien — no longer a partner in dialogue but a resolutely silent Other.
Thing (n.) is not a blank substrate holding properties but a single accent heard in all of them: glass's brittleness, hardness, transparency and ring translate one way of being.