Monday, February 26, 2007
The Neurophilosopher reports that lizards modify their displays in response to visual noise. Two issues strike me from reading the paper by Ord et al: (a) the plasticity of anole lizard display behaviour, which the authors will not confirm though they believe it deserves further study, and (b) the richness of an environment that includes noise. The response to acoustic noise is well documented in a variety of other species. Does the response to noise imply an idea of noise? Does it imply a cogitation?
Labels: display, environment, lizards, noise, zoosemiosis
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Deleuze wraps up his discussion of the actualization of the virtual:
Actualisation takes place in three series: space, time and also consciousness. Every spatio-temporal dynamism is accompanied by the emergence of an elementary consciousness which itself traces directions, doubles movements and migrations, and is born on the threshold of the condensed singularities of the body or object whose consciousness it is. It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something: it is the double of this something, and everything is consciousness because it possesses a double, even if it is far off and very foreign. Repetition is everywhere, as much as in what is actualised as in its actualisation. It is in the Idea to begin with, and it runs through the varieties of relations and the distribution of singular points. It also determines the reproductions of space and time, as it does the reprises of consciousness.
(Difference and Repetition, p. 220, emphasis mine)
Sinthome recently posted a very good explanation of how Deleuze's account of individuation underlies his thinking about learning and Ideas, which I think is helpful in grasping what Deleuze means by the sentence that I've emphasized. There is yet another implication which I'd like to explore. Speaking of conceptual blockage, Deleuze asks provocatively "who blocks the concept, if not the Idea?" (p. 220, emphasis Deleuze's). I take it to be Deleuze's position that the who of the idea is not an identity. Does this make sense? What sort of who can we mean when speaking of the who of the idea?
Labels: consciousness, Deleuze, ideas, intentionality, larval subjects, panpsychism, repetition
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Deleuze says that differences in the system of language should not be thought of essential oppositions, which introduces the point of view of a representational consciousness, but should rather be seen as the entry points to a "transcendent exploration of the Idea of the linguistic unconscious" (Difference and Repetition, p. 204). He cites approvingly the work of linguist Gustave Guillaume, whose Foundations for a Science of Language I've just requested from the library. A somewhat different take on Guillaume comes from Marc André Bélanger's Chaos, Complexity and Gustave Guillaume. I'll withhold judgement on what Guillaume is really all about, but since the paper has come to my attention, I want to look at what Bélanger has to say about the infant's exposure to language, which stands in contrast to the way Cavarero has portrayed vocalizations between mother and child in early infancy.
When a child learns his mother tongue, he does so by trying to reconstruct the system behind the utterance he hears...[T]he order of the system comes not only from the "aggregated behaviour" of humans as speakers but also from the mind of the infant (Latin: "unable to speak") learning his tongue. The child will make all the intuitive generalizations he can based on the evidence, and will form, reconstruct, the best system he can. As he grows up, he figures out through a process which entails both induction and deduction (and, as Pierce would say, abduction) the different categories of words and what each can and cannot do.
("Chaos," p. 7, emphasis Bélanger's)
In many respects Cavarero presents the more realistic account of infant vocalizations. The first facts of language that are learned by the infant are its rhythms, its musicality, its embodiment and its relationality (For More than One Voice, p. 180 and passim). However, I wonder whether she doesn't go too far in her banishment of the subject (see this passage for example). If Bélanger's infant subject seems a little too advanced to be credible, the alternative of no conscious subject of language learning also appears to be, well, a little too larval. Most infants eventually do learn to speak, and it's difficult to imagine this happening without any glimmers of consciousnesss whatsoever.
Deleuze has much to say about learning, but I wonder about the strategy of placing everything and the kitchen sink in the realm of the unconscious. When all is said and done, what does consciousness mean to Deleuze?
Labels: Cavarero, Deleuze, Guillaume, infant, language, learning, strange attractor, the unconscious
Cavarero asks us to think of uniqueness as "an understanding [un'intesa] and as a reciprocal dependence" (p. 182). The latter term suggests what Cavarero might mean by "understanding," but I'd like to begin by asking what kind of understanding is possible in the absence of consciousness, for Cavarero's privileging of speech over thought in the logos comes with a hearty dose of antipathy toward nous. She writes of a phenomenology of the voice, yet there is no place in her phenomenology for a conscious subject. Mouths communicate with ears and the recognition of vocal uniqueness occurs spontaneously, as if by magic. "The phenomenology of speaking possesses an autonomous status in which the relationality of mouths and ears comes to the fore" (p. 174). By "autonomous" Cavarero means autonomous with respect to thought, that speaking isn't merely the acoustic manifestation of thinking. She intends to give back flesh and bone back to the subject, but unlike the phenomenologies of Patočka, Herny or Merleau-Ponty, she has not elaborated a notion of bodily awareness–actually she sort of does have such a notion, but it comes in bits and pieces. For example she says that the "ear distinguishes sound and knows it to be human not only because it vibrates in the specifically human element of speech, but also because the ear percieves its uniqueness" (p. 178). Whereas Cavarero portrays the communication between mouths and ears of others as direct and instantaneaous, she cuts out of the picture altogether communication between the ears and mouth of a conscious subject. There is nothing to explain the unity of the mouth and ears, no explanation of how the knowledge that the ear possesses pertains to the mouth of a hearing subject or anything other than the ear.
Speaking of Levinas' ontology of the face-to-face, Cavarero says that "[r]ather than the atemporal dimension of a lasting permanence, the face to face evokes a discontinuous becoming, characterized by the ever-new 'present' of the 'nows' in which the gazes intersect" (p. 177). While reciprocity is sometimes an attribute of the gaze, Cavarero argues it always an attribute of the voice. "[T]he voice is always, irremediably relational" (p. 177). In one manner of speaking, relationality is not a contingency but a necessary condition of a kind of understanding. To make this argument was it necessary to dethrone to nous? I see two steps that had to be taken: (1) the critique of atemporality, or presence, which Cavarero sees as a property claimed for nous; and (2) a decentering of understanding. I don't see how the complete obliteration of a noetic faculty makes sense in this context, though I will admit that this is not the kindest reading of Cavarero, and what I am really after is settling a question in my own mind as to how understanding is possible.
Labels: body, Cavarero, noesis, plurality, reciprocity, uniqueness
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
As Michael Pakaluk continues to probe what Heraclitus meant by saying that you can't step into the same river twice, and as the Zambezi has recently flooded its banks, I have been giving some thought to rivers and ideas of rivers, and I am hoping, vainly perhaps, that this thinking will give me some purchase on what Deleuze means when he talks about ideas.
To begin with, I'll announce a prejudice. I might say the existence of the river is pragmatic, even though there is some ambiguity about what the term "pragmatic" entails. What I mean here is that unlike the human being or perhaps the trout, the existence of the river has neither tragic nor comic implications. The river's finitude is not an issue for it. It does not exist for itself. Its existence is only an issue for beings to whom it appears, for whom it is real..
One of the first challenges for me that arises from Deleuze is the question of whether I can think the idea of the river without thinking an essence. Ideas, Deleuze claims, are inessential.
Ideas are by no means essences. In so far as they are the objects of Ideas, problems belong on the side of events, affections, or accidents rather than on that of theoromatic essences. Ideas are developed in the auxiliaries and the adjunct fields by which their synthetic power is measured. Consequently. the domain of ideas is that of the inessential.
(Difference and Repetition, p. 187)
For Deleuze the philosophical question "What is the river?" ought not be taken literally. ("When Socratic irony was taken seriously and the dialectic was confused with its propaedeutic, extremely troublesome consequences followed: for the dialectic ceased to be the science of problems and ultimately became confused with the simple movement of the negative, and of contradiction," p. 188). When the Zambezi floods its banks how should we then approach the question, "What is the river, after all?" We could broaden our understanding of the river, speak of the river system, and natural cycles of flooding. Does there remain the problem of the essence of the river? Is the problem of reaching an accommodation with the river in any way related to a problem of being able to say what the river essentially is? I couldn't say.
"An idea is an n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity," says Deleuze; multiplicity, Deleuze says, is "substance itself" (p. 182). Hmmm.
Ideas are complexes of coexistence. In a certain sense all Ideas coexist, but they do so at points, on the edges, and under glimmerings which never have the uniformity of a natural light. On each occasion, obscurities and zones of shadow correspond to their distinction. Ideas are distinguished from one another, but not at all in the same manner as forms and the terms in which these are incarnated. They are objectively made and unmade according to the conditions which determine their fluent synthesis.
(pp. 186-187)
Here's a question then: Is there any idea of the river that doesn't imply the coexistence of some other ideas? Is an apophantics of the river, an idea of the river as such, even possible?
Labels: Deleuze, Heraclitus, ideas, pragmatism, rivers, Zambezi
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Cavarero, speaking of the sharing of voices between a mother and her infant, reworks the myth of Echo:
This is the very music that Kristeva and Cixous speak of when they name the maternal figure as the sonorous, presemantic source of language. Because they rely on a psychoanalytic framework, however, their attention goes to the pleasure drive that is inscribed in this musicality, linked to the mouth as the center of oral pleasure. The languelait of the mother, voice and milk, is given to the ear and the mouth. The shadow of psychoanalysis thus ends up obscuring the relationality of the scene, sacrificing it to the originary bond between mother and child. As a result, the phenomenon of vocalic uniqueness is once again effaced. Unlike the bond of mother and child, a relation carries with it the act of distinguishing oneself, constituting the uniqueness of each one through this distinction. In the case of the vocalizations and gurgles that the mother and the infant exchange, this uniqueness makes itself heard incontrovertibly as voice. The infant recognizes the mother's voice and sings a duet with her. Resonance, daughter of invocation, links the two voices in the form of a rhythmic bond. What makes the uniqueness of the two voices stand out, in fact, is this repetition, echo, and miming, becuase they duplicate the same sounds. The voice is always unique, but all the more so in the vocalic exercise of repetition. In fact, by challenging the economy of the same, uniqueness is here entrusted to nothing other than the singular voice. This does not mean that in this vocalic language mother and child are constituted as subjects. The phantasm of the subject is a fictitious entity generated by philosophy; it belongs to language as a system of signification; it comes from the devocalizing strategy of theoria. And yet this does not mean that there is no distinction between mother and infant. On the contrary, there is a process of self-distinction in the repetitive rhythm of the duet, in the reciprocal giving of uniqueness and relation, just like a song for two voices–communication, already regulated, of language whose rules are not semantic but acoustic. It is indeed a song, no longer intentioned toward speech, with which each invokes the other and communicates himself or herself in the interdependent form of the resonance. The uniqueness of the vocalic is inaugurated on a scene where, unlike what happens on the scene of the "subject," there are no dreams of autonomy or hierarchical principles. Free from the presence of Narcissus and from Ovid's textual games, Echo comes to appear as the divinity who teaches an acoustic relationality, still linked to infantile pleasure, in which uniqueness makes itself heard as voice.
(For More than One Voice, pp. 171-172, emphasis Cavarero's)
I am, incidentally, enjoying Cavarero's style.
Labels: Cavarero, dyad, infant, l'écriture féminine, relationality, semiotic, uniqueness
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
This is fun:
Once communication between heterogeneous series is established, all sorts of consequences follow within the system. Something 'passes' between the borders, events explode, phenomena flash, like thunder and lightning. Spatio-temporal dynamisms fill the system, expressing simultaneously the resonance of the coupled series and the amplitude of the forced movement which exceeds them. The system is populated by subjects, both larval subjects and passive selves: passive selves because they are indistinguishable from the contemplation of couplings and resonances, larval subjects because they are supports or patients of the dynamisms. In effect, a pure spatio-temporal dynamism, with its necessary participation in the forced movement, can be experienced only at the borders of the livable, under conditions beyond which it would entail the death of any well-constituted subject endowed with independence and activity. Embryology already displays the truth that there are systematic vital movements, tortions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them. There are movements for which one can only be a patient, but the patient in turn can only be a larva. Evolution does not take place in the open air, and only the involuted evolves. A nightmare is perhaps a psychic dynamism that could be sustained neither awake nor even in dreams, but only in profound sleep, in a dreamless sleep. In this sense, it is not even clear that thought, in so far as it constitutes the dynamism peculiar to philosophical systems, may be related to a substantial, completed and well-constituted subject, such as the Cartesian Cogito: thought is, rather, one of those terrible movements which can be sustained only under the conditions of a larval subject. These systems admit only such subjects as these, since they alone can undertake the forced movement by becoming the patient of the dynamisms which express it. Even the philosopher is a larval subject of his own system. Thus we see that these systems are defined not only by heterogeneous series which border them, nor by the coupling, the resonance and the forced movement which constitute their dimensions, but also by the subjects which populate them and the dynamisms which fill them, and finally by the qualities and extensities which develop on the basis of such dynamisms.
(Difference and Repetition, pp. 118-119).
Is thinking only possible on condition of an endless becoming? I'm not sure what to make of that. I'm not even sure that it makes sense to think of becoming without end. Have I become anything, or have I become many things, many people? I have for example become a blogger. Am I still in the process of becoming a blogger, or am I becoming something else now by blogging, an inveterate blogger perhaps, or a blogger in such and such a style. Isn't is so, though, that I have blogged?
More and more I think about senescence. Naturally, I am growing old–even the language we use to talk about aging betrays a prejudice towards becoming. Is senescence really a becoming, or is that kind of thinking euphemistic? Why is it so much easier to see natality as part of the human condition than senescence?
Perpetual becoming and endless becoming should be thought of as two different things. Perpetual becoming has its ends; it's just that they are multiple, and becoming can be repeated. Endless becoming is only questionably a becoming.
(Update. I have an obvious prejudice against fantasy. Is this purely a moralistic position, or do I have some reason to believe that the fantastic can be transcended, and that this transcendence is, like fantasy, part of the human condition? Would I really want to live in a world without fantasy?)
At the end of the day my image of thought will differ from Deleuze's. He says that "in fact men think rarely, and more often under the impulse of a shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking" (p. 132). I think people are constantly immersed in thought. Thought is steeped in the regularities of daily life. If much of this thought doesn't appear to be philosophical, I'm not sure that isn't a problem for philosophy rather than a problem with the way people think.
Labels: Deleuze, larval subjects, natality, senescence, thinking
Sunday, February 11, 2007
"Organisms awake to the sublime world of the third Ennead: all is contemplation!" (Difference and Repetition, p. 75). I have a problem acknowledging my philodendron's contemplative soul. At the same time, I wouldn't want to absolutely deny that the philodendron's life has meaning. What exactly is Deleuze asking me to believe (not without irony) with respect to the philodendron? In the first place, I would have to believe that the philodendron experiences passive synthesis, a prereflective consciousness of the living present. This living present would have to include a retention of whence it's been and an anticipation of whither it's going. Minimally, the philodendron would have to know that it's alive. This would seem to resemble a practical sort of knowledge, a knowledge based on habitus. However, Deleuze suggests that habits are acquired not through action but through contemplation (p.73). For Deleuze contemplation means "to draw something from" the contraction that is habit, the fusion of elements (tick tick) or cases (tick tock) in a contemplative soul (p.74).
In the second place–and it is not at all clear to me that Deleuze would extend this analysis to plant life, except that he would have me acknowledge the contemplative soul of the plant–Deleuze says that "[e]ach contraction, each passive synthesis, constitutes a sign which is interpreted or deployed in active synthesis" (p.73). At this point I have to balk. It is one thing to say that my philodendron has a knowledge of its own life; it's quite another to say that is capable of active synthesis, of signifying, or questioning (which is another meaning Deleuze gives for contemplation (p.78)). To be fair to Deleuze, he is offering a special definition of signs. He says, "Signs as we have defined them–as habitudes or contractions referring to one another–always belong to the present," and he distinguishes a class of natural signs, based on passive synthesis only, from artificial signs which imply active synthesis.(p.77). This is a bit confusing. What would be the role of interpretation in the case of natural signs?
Finally, what power of imagination does the philodendron possess? How are its repetitions thinkable? Deleuze says that repetition is essentially imaginary (p.76). He also says that "[t]he constitution of repetition already implies three instances: the in-itself which causes it to disappear as it appears, leaving it unthinkable; the for-itself of the passive synthesis; and, grounded upon the latter, the reflected representation of a 'for-us' in the active synthesis" (p.71). If the philodendron's repetitions are not unthinkable, then it must have a power of "spontaneous imagination" (p.77), an image of its own life. Again, this is a problem for me, because I don't want to anthropomorphize my philodendron, and yet I can't be certain that it's life doesn't mean something to it.
Labels: Deleuze, panpsychism, passive synthesis, philodendron, Plotinus
Thursday, February 08, 2007
"Behind the platonic Socrates," Cavarero reminds us, "there is the figure of the historical Socrates who intends philosophizing as speaking, rather than as thinking or contemplating" (For More than One Voice, p. 67). Naturally Socrates wouldn't tell us that we shouldn't say what we think or think about what we say. Yet if there's going to be a divorce of thought from speech, why should we assume that philosophy belongs with (speechless) thought?
Against Nietzsche, and borrowing a thesis from Giorgio Colli, Cavarero posits that "with the advent of videocentric metaphysics, the Appolonian–the enigmatic sphere of speech–is subjected to the ecstatic frenzy of vision" (p. 78). The enigmatic sphere of speech.. In what sense is Socrates' philosophy grounded in the enigmatic sphere of speech? For Socrates philosophy is not just any speaking, but specifically confutation, a dialectic of questions and answers that leads to aporia. Cavarero argues:
If logos were transparent, simply representational, univocal in its capacity to say things, then the dialectic undertaking would not function. Like the ancient enigma, dialectic counts on the constitutive ambiguity of logos.
(p. 78)
Is this akin to saying that philosophical problems are basically just problems of language? Hmm. Cavarero would have us believe that who is speaking fundamentally matters. How do we talk about this problem of who speaks as something other than merely rhetorical?
Labels: Cavarero, logos, Socrates
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Cavarero writes:
In the theater of consciousness, the natural relationality of the vocal–the acoustic relationality that speech itself, insofar as it is sonorous, confirms–is preemptively neutralized in favor of a silent and internal voice that produces a self-referential type of relation, an ego-logical relation between the self and itself. The price for the elimination of the physicality of the voice is thus, first of all, the elimination of the other, or, better, of others. Already announced in platonic metaphysics, the silent dialogue of the soul with itself is not only a monologue; it is a soliloquy that–while it metaphorizes itself on the voice–neutralizes the relational status of the voice and thus of speech in general. The soul, as Plato ends up suggesting, can do without the bodily phone and contents itself with a metaphorical voice. And from this point on, the soul speaks with a voice that does not reverberate. When its interior discourse comes out of the mouth and is vocalized, it thus finds itself confronted with a verbal interlocution that spoils the mute and disembodied perfection of the solipsistic colloquium. It must register the fact that, beneath the silent firmament of the ideas, there are human beings in flesh and bone who are particular, contigent, and finite. It must renounce the metaphysical dream that stands ready to sacrifice the vocality of speech in order not to have to worry about the existence of others.
(For More than One Voice, p. 46)
I had lightly questioned whether, given the dialogic nature of inner speech, it were possible to conduct a monologue. (By the way, the previous sentence was rehearsed in inner speech before I typed it, as was this very sentence, including this very inclusion.) Well, sure it's possible. The question is how is it possible, and also, what does it mean? Is soliloquy only possible as a fiction, or, better, a device? What does it show by pointing to inner speech? Is it really possible to cover over the relationality of the voice with silence in inner speech, to obliterate other voices, or is it rather more like a suspension of relationality. If inner speech functions as a rehearsal for articulations, does this not imply as a condition of possibility the existence of others, even a worry about the existence of others? Why believe that inner speech points to silence instead of the possibility of conversations yet to be realized?
Labels: Cavarero, dialogism, inner speech
Deleuze says:
Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative; rather it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question. Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference: heteron, not enantion. For this reason non-being should rather be written (non)-being or, better still, ?-being.
(Difference and Repetition, p. 64, emphasis Deleuze's)
Deleuze himself opts for "(non)-being" instead of "?-being" right through to his conclusions. This is precisely ironic ("Irony consists in treating things and beings as so many responses to hidden questions, so many cases for problems yet to be resolved," p. 63), pointedly so given that Deleuze faults Heidegger for encouraging misunderstandings by his treatment of nothingness (p. 66).
Deleuze's reading of Heidegger deserves special notice. He says, "Ontological Difference corresponds to questioning. It is the being of questions, which become problems, marking out the determinant fields of existence" (p.65). I hadn't quite thought of ontological difference that way, though it does have the ring of the familiar. This leads me to ask some questions of my own.
One set of questions concerns the nature of Deleuze's discourse on difference. I wonder whether, ironically, Deleuze isn't pursuing an idealism. This idealism would have to be understood as radically divergent from Plato's idealism, which Deleuze seeks to overturn. Deleuze says that "the difficulty facing everything is to become its own simulacrum, to attain the status of a sign in the coherence of the eternal return" (p. 67). For Deleuze, simulacra are not less real than the things themselves, so to speak; rather, they point to "the lived reality of a sub-representative domain" (p.69). Ideas are not grounding in Deleuze's thinking. However, the question of how we relate to the real involves a semiotics that covers much the same ground as an idealism by passing through a terrain of consciousness for whom things are real or, more fundamentally, for whom things are so many problems and questions. The ground that isn't covered is the domain of representation. The question for me is, if we allow for Deleuze's overturning of representation, are we still left with something like a world of ideas, or a world of ideation?
This brings me to another set of questions concerning the horizon of questioning, which may also be thought of as the horizon of difficulty. Who or what occupies this horizon? Deleuze thinks that the cogito is a stupidity. He says:
The subject of the Cartesian Cogito does not think: it only has the possibility of thinking, and remains stupid at the heart of that possibility. It lacks the form of the determinable: not a specificity, not a specific form informing a matter, not a memory informing a present, but the pure and empty form of time. It is the empty form of time which introduces and constitutes Difference in thought, on the basis of which it thinks, in the form of the difference between the indeterminate and determination. It is this form of thought which distributes throughout itself an I fractured by the abstract line, a passive self produced by a groundlessness that it contemplates. It is this which engenders thought within thought, for thought thinks only by means of difference, around this point of ungrounding.
(p. 276)
There is room in Deleuze's philosophy for a (fractured) subject who thinks, indeed a demand for it, while more primordially there is repetition and difference, a being-in-question and its conduct. Is it possible to ask in Deleuze's philosophy who this being-in-qeustion really is? Does (non)-being here stand for the guy behind the guy behind the guy? And is this the reason why Deleuze prefers to say "(non)-being" instead of "?-being"?.
Labels: Deleuze, egology, Heidegger, ontology
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Cavarero quotes Hans Jonas: "what sound immediately reveals is not an object but a dynamic event in the place of an object" (from The Phenomenon of Life, quoted in For More than One Voice, p. 37; I've ordered some books by Hans Jonas with the intention of blogging about him; in the meantime, I'll just look at Cavarero's riff on Jonas.) We hear the barking and not the dog, Cavarero says. Is it true that one does not immediately hear the dog, that the dog can only be inferred? In my mind barking is already semantically +dog. If we didn't hear the dog in the barking, it would not be barking but some (other) kind of noise. Perhaps this example of the barking dog is merely a poor illustration of an idea. "What characterizes sound is not being but becoming," Cavarero says. If that were true, though, it should be evident in the phenomenon of the barking dog.
The larger task here for Cavarero is to critique a metaphysics of presence based on analogy with the visual, a "strange history of the devocalization of the logos" (p. 40).
The entire philosophical lexicon in fact finds its base in the objectivity and presence of things, which is guaranteed by this detached gaze. This starts above all with Plato, who uses the term theoria to mean "the contemplation of real, lasting, immobile things" whose truth lies in being visible, in being ideas. The decisive element is, of course, presence. This presence refers both to the spatial dimension that is typical of the object that lies in front of the onlooker, and to the temporal dimension of a simultaneous "now" that is eternalized by the contemplator. The only reason that hearing does not occupy a more fundamental place in this conceptual structure is that sounds are perceived in succession rather than simultaneously: "sounds exist in a sequence where each 'now' disappears into the past as soon as it happens."
(p. 38)
My neighbor's dog has quit barking. I'm not sure that I've ever seen that particular dog. There are many dogs in the neighborhood. But I know that dog's bark. I don't particularly question the dog's permanence even though I can't hear it at the moment. On what basis do I assign the permanence that belongs to being a dog to the event of a dog's barking? I can't quite believe that the history of metaphysics is misleading me on this point. On the contrary, I'm inclined to believe that we do in fact hear objects, and that these are immediate facts of experience.
Labels: Cavarero, experience, Jonas, sound
Thursday, February 01, 2007
See Eric Mohr's post on Intentionality in Early German Phenomenology.
Does Scheler's idea of an ens amans (loving being) upset a received notion of ontology, or was this already going to be upset anyway by the idea of intentionality? In what sense are phenomenology or existential phenomenology not anthropologies? Just rambling.
Labels: anthropology, love, Mohr, phenomenology, Scheler