Our ideas, however limited they may be at a given moment - since they always express our contact with being and with culture - are capable of being true provided we keep them open to the field of nature and culture which they must express. And this possibility is always open to us, just because we are temporal. The idea of going straight to the essence of things is an inconsistent idea if one thinks about it. What is given is a route, an experience which gradually clarifies itself and with others. Thus, what we tear away from the dispersion of instants is not a ready-made reason; it is, as has always been said, a natural light, our openness to something. What saves us is the possibility of a new development, and our power of making even what is false, true - by thinking through our errors and replacing them within the domain of truth. — Merleau-Ponty. June 01, 2016
There is a paradox of immanence and transcendence in perception. Immanence, because the perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives; transcendence because it always contains something more than is actually given. — Merleau-Ponty. June 01, 2016
The perceived thing is not an ideal unity in the possession of the intellect, like a geometrical notion, for example; it is rather a totality open to a horizon of an infinite number of perspectival views which blend with one another according to a given style, which defines the object in question. — Merleau-Ponty. June 01, 2016
The perceptual synthesis must be accomplished by the subject, which can both delimit certain perspectival aspects in the object, the only ones actually given, and at the same time go beyond them. — Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. June 01, 2016
In particular, the apparent contrast between the continuous onward flow of associative thinking and the preservation of the unity of the personality exhibits a suggestive analogy with the relation between the wave description of the motions of material particles, governed by the superposition principle, and their indestructible individuality. — Niels Bohr, The Quantum of Action and the Description of Nature. February 08, 2016
[…] a “phenomenon” is the description of that which is to be observed and of the apparatus used to obtain the observation. — Gerald Holton on Niels Bohr’s quantum postulate. February 04, 2016
Je sais qu’on ne peut jamais se connaitre mais seulement se raconter. — Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l’âge. December 17, 2015
It seems to me that our perception of things is determined by the ideas that we have about them. It’s a case of a certain mental space that one has for both seeing and thinking. We like to feel that they are separate, but they are not - they overlap. They overlap in our conception of things, and consequently, our experience of them. — Mel Bochner. December 01, 2015