#phenomenology

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... ↗

— David Zindell

#phenomenology #spirituality #life

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. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#instrumentality #phenomenology #science #scientism #experience

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. ↗

— Edmund Husserl

#consciousness #descriptive #ideal #large #only

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#language #nature #phenomenology #words #writing

[True Spirit] exists in the universal talk and destructive judgement which strips of their significance all those moments which are supposed to count as the true being and as actual members of the whole, and is equally this nihilistic game which it plays with itself. ↗

— G.W.F. Hegel

#nihilism #phenomenology-of-mind #phenomenology-of-spirit #equality

There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation. ↗

— Donald Davidson

#phenomenology #the-other #the-self #the-world #nature

Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language - that is, the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is, as Mallarmé said, the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary - speech which signifies, which finally renders "l'absente de tous bouquets" present and frees the sense captive in the thing - is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. 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. ↗

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

#phenomenology #poetry #silence #life

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. ↗

— Edmund Husserl

#century #claims #clarified #concept #deal

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

— Edmund Husserl

#consciousness #phenomenology #proposition #pure #put

Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science -- the dream is over. ↗

— Edmund Husserl

#philosophy #science #dreams