The Philosophotographer

The community of causes and consequences in which we are enmeshed is the widest and deepest symbol of the mysterious totality of being the imagination calls the universe. It is the embodiment for sense and thought of that encompassing scope of existence the intellect cannot grasp. It is the matrix within which our ideal aspirations are born and bred.

—John Dewey, A Common Faith

I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I go through it.

—Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”

Human society is not only a world of work. Simultaneously, or successively, it is made up of the profane and the sacred, its two complementary forms. The profane world is the world of taboos. The sacred world depends on limited acts of transgression. The taboo would forbid the transgression, but the fascination compels it.

—Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art. In a picture or a piece of music the idea is incommunicable by means other than the display of colors and sounds. It is a nexus of living meanings.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception