If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.
Terry EagletonTags: consciousness communication language meaning failure psychoanalysis discourse unconscious lacan freudian-slips parapraxis
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.
Terry EagletonTags: consciousness identity language meaning subjectivity ego psychoanalysis descartes unconscious lacan cogito
Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.
NovalisTags: wisdom consciousness philosophy waking novalis
I swoon into a standing eight count. Goddamn, I actually feel my consciousness want to detach and hide like a turtle retreating into a hopelessly soft shell that won't save anyone.
Paul TremblayTags: consciousness sleep
What drains your spirit drains your body. What fuels your spirit fuels your body.
Caroline MyssTags: consciousness peace soul health spirituality healing enlightenment insights
The images of things are not the things in themselves.
E.L. DoctorowTags: consciousness images
Idris: Are all people like this?
The Doctor: Like what?
Idris: So much bigger on the inside.
Tags: consciousness humanity soul potential doctor-who brilliance vastness the-doctor-s-wife tardis human-greatness
Though denigrated by some outside academia and research, she embraced knowledge for its own sake and what better way to honor that than reveling in the intricacies of the brain? If there were any answers to the human condition, if an immortal soul made its home anywhere, it was in its spongy gray folds.
Thomm QuackenbushTags: consciousness soul brain
Going beyond thoughts is merely to reduce the multiplicity of your thought.
Thoughts lead to words, words to language, language to action.
Action to realization, and back again to thoughts.
For the mind is made up of words, language and logic, until it dissolves into consciousness.
Tags: consciousness spirituality awareness thoughts
Universal or quantum consciousness emphasizes that we are all interrelated, interconnected and interdependent.
Gian KumarTags: consciousness interralated
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