Katia N’s Reviews > Phenomenology of Perception > Status Update

2/2 All knowledge is established within the horizons opened up by perception. Since perception is the “flaw" in this "great diamond," there can be no question of describing it as one of the facts that happens in the world, for the picture of the world will always include this lacuna that we are and by which the world
itself comes to exist for someone.

1/2 If we believe in the word past in the physical world in stimuli and in the organism such as it is represented by textbooks this is first of all because we have a present and real perceptual field, a surface of contact with the world or a perpetual rooting in it; it is because the world ceaselessly bombards and besieges subjectivity just as waves surround a shipwreck on the beach.

To understand is to experience the accord between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the realisation- and the body is our anchorage in a world.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to sense, and there is nothing we can do or say that does not acquire a name in history.

Thus the permanence of one’s body if classical psychology has analysed it could have directed it toward the body no longer as an object of the world but rather as our means of communication with it, or could have directed it toward the world, no longer as sum of determinate objects but rather as a latent horizon of our experience, itself ceaselessly present prior to all determining thought.