1. Every philosophical act rests on pre-philosophical experiences.

But it is appropriate for the

human person not only to adapt to the environment, but also to address oneself to the task of
seeing the world as a whole. To philosophize does not mean to look away from ones
environment, from the things of everyday life, but from the currently accepted meanings attached
to them.

2. To go back to the intentional origins and unities of the formation of meaning is to proceed
toward a comprehension which, once achieved (which is of course an ideal case), would leave no
meaningful question unanswered. But every serious and genuine move from a ready made
being back to its intentional origins gives us, in respect to those strata already uncovered and
the clarification of what is accomplished in them, an understanding which, though merely
relative, is yet an actual understanding as far as it goes.

3. The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.

4. The Cartesian ego sum, ego existo, and the phenomenological esprit incarn are two
different views of human existence. Whereas the Cartesian Archimedean point leads to an image
of the human person as a res cogitans, phenomenology immediately recognizes that the human
person is lived awareness of corporeality.

5. I have my body, I am my body. My relationship to my body is so immediate and so intimate

that my body ceases to be a mere instrument or tool in relating to the world. I am not in front of
my body, I am in it, or rather I am it. The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but
rather to a work of art.

6. Let us no longer say that time is a datum of consciousness; let us be more precise and say
that consciousness unfolds or constitutes time. The present is not a closed unit, an atom with
clearly defined borders before and after. The present is rather an opening; it expands into the

future by protention and maintains the past by retention. The conscious present is elastic,
expanded into the future and the past.

7. To be human is to become human while being shaped by the facts of history. But being
conscious of this, we also become aware of our possibilities. Historicity is both a destiny and a
responsibility. Human work is the foundation of history.

8. Since the inception of modern science in the 17th century, technology and the machine greatly
influenced every level of human life. Modern science and technology radically altered human
history for the past 400 years. The romanticized ideal of machines replacing human labor gave
way to the contemporary technocratic malady.

9. Marxs critique of political economy must be understood from the standpoint of his
anthropology, i.e that the human being is a species-being. Not only has political economy
severed the link between humanity and nature, Marx speaks of the estrangement of the human
being from himself and from his labor which runs contrary to human dignity and value.

10. To testify presupposes that there is something to testify and others to testify to, not to
mention the source of this something. In the final analysis, the philosopher does not stand before
a solitary truth already finished, but before a communal truth, a truth that can be shared and
nurtured by other human beings like him because it comes from a Transcendent that
encompasses his own self and others.