Zollikon Seminars - Select Passages

Select Passages

• 24 or 28 January 1964

Why can't there be something real that is not susceptible to exact measurement? Why not sorrow, for example?

• 2 November 1964

The basic character of nature represented by the natural sciences is conformity to law. Calculability is a consequence of this conformity to law. Of all that is, only that which is measurable and quantifiable is taken into account.

• 18 January 1965

The nature of being sick cannot be adequately grasped without a sufficient determination of being healthy...It is an ontological phenomenon, that is, it refers to a possibility of being and not merely to the logic of a propositional negation.

• 11 May 1965

But are the connections between psyche and soma something psychological, something somatic, or neither one or the other? We wind up in a dead end, which shows you better than anything else how essential the question of method is.

• 6 July 1965

In Greek and medieval thought, the concept of an object and of objectivity did not yet exist. Objectivity is a definite modification of the presence of things...Modern science rests on the transformation of the experience of the presence of beings into objectivity.

• 23 November 1965

Daseinanalysis is ontic. The analytic of Dasein is ontological.