Thinking Which Displaces, Or Otherwise Defines, The

True Reflection Presents Me To Myself Not As Idle And Inaccessible Subjectivity, But As Identical With My Presence In The World And To Others, As I Am Now Realizing It: I Am All That I See, I Am An Intersubjective Field, Not Despite My Body And Historical Situation, But, On The Contrary, By Being This Body And This Situation, And Through Them, All The Rest.

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.

Nothing Determines Me From Outside, Not Because Nothing Acts Upon Me, But, On The Contrary, Because I Am From The Start Outside Myself And Open To The World.

Even Those Who Have Desired To Work Out A Completely Positive Philosophy Have Been Philosophers Only To The Extent That, At The Same Time, They Have Refused The Right To Install Themselves In Absolute Knowledge. They Taught Not This Knowledge, But Its Becoming In Us, Not The Absolute But, At Most, Our Absolute Relation To It, As Kierkegaard Said. What Makes A Philosopher Is The Movement Which Leads Back Without Ceasing From Knowledge To Ignorance, From Ignorance To Knowledge, And A Kind Of Rest In This Movement.

Being Established In My Life, Buttressed By My Thinking Nature, Fastened Down In This Transcendental Field Which Was Opened For Me By My First Perception, And In Which All Absence Is Merely The Obverse Of A Presence, All Silence A Modality Of The Being Of Sound, I Enjoy A Sort Of Ubiquity And Theoretical Eternity, I Feel Destined To Move In A Flow Of Endless Life, Neither The Beginning Nor The End Of Which I Can Experience In Thought, Since It Is My Living Self Who Think Of Them, And Since Thus My Life Always Precedes And Survives Itself.