The experience of the agreement between the meaning and what is itself present, meant, between the actual sense of an assertion and the self-given state of affairs, is inward evidence; the Idea of this agreement is truth, whose ideality is also its objectivity.

Every real thing, and ultimately the whole world as it exists for us in such and such a way, only exists as an actual or possible cogitatum of our own cogitatio, as a possible experiential content of our own experience; and in dealing with the content of our own life of thought and knowing, the best case being in myself, one may assume our own (intersubjective) operations for testing and proving as the pre-eminent form of evidentially grounded truth. Thus, for us, true being is a name for products of actual and possible cognitive operations, an accomplishment of cognition.

Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for example. But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity.’ It is a transcendental philosophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, the better to understand them; but it is also a philosophy for which the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins – as an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon reachieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status.

We ordered the speciality of the house, apricot cocktails; [Raymond] Aron said, pointing to his glass: “You see my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy of it!” Sartre turned pale with emotion at this. Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve for years – to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process. Aron convinced him that phenomenology exactly fitted in with his special preoccupations: by-passing the antithesis of idealism and realism, affirming simultaneously both the supremacy of reason and the reality of the visible world as it appears to our senses.

Rationality is precisely proportioned to the experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed into absolute spirit, or into a world in the realist sense.

The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction. This is why Husserl is constantly re-examining the possibility of the reduction. If we were absolute mind, the reduction would present no problem. But since, on the contrary, we are in the world, since indeed our reflections are carried out in the temporal flux on the which we are trying to seize, there is no thought which embraces all our thought.

My ability to get around this city, this house comes out only in getting around this city and house. We can draw a neat line between my picture of an object and that object, but not between my dealing with the object and that object. It may make sense to ask us to focus on what we believe about something, say a football, even in the absence of that thing; but when it comes to playing football, the corresponding suggestion would be absurd. The actions involved in the game can’t be done without the object; they include the object.

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousnes of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.