Fido the Yak

Barbaras reads Merleau-Ponty as wanting "to reestablish the experience itself of ideality" (Being, p. 235). He says further, "The fidelity to experience, to which the dialectic of the visible and invisible bears witness, imposes the recognition of the intelligible as a specific experience; that is, the fidelity of experience imposes that we distinguish ideality in the strict sense from the 'ideas' that are inscribed within the heart of the sensible" (p. 236).

The irrealization of experience absent any magistral discursive function (though not deposed of all possibilities for learning), which is to say experience on an equal footing with the experience of itself, exposes variation as an element inscribed within the experiential. I want to interpret experience as it is experienced, yet I read variation into experience by the very ideation that brings it to consciousness. It appears equally true that variation was already "there" within experience as a condition for reading anything at all into experience, into indicating a movement between an experience and its other. Fidelity to whyless variation—chaosmic, spasmoreal whyless variation—is a requirement of fidelity to experience. Plurality emerges more or less suddenly in tandem with experience, which is the source of the difficulty in saying definitively "experience means p," or "experience means q."

Perhaps on a note of tension, then, I share with you Barbaras' statement that "the sensible already carries within it the entire destiny of meanings, but in it meaning remains opaque and allusive" (p. 237). Meaning doesn't stand still except by allusion. At best it sometimes plays alongside remaining in place. In its original form meaning precisely and almost at once not entirely departs. Remaining is a departure of meaning.

Labels: Barbaras, experience, imagination

posted by Fido the Yak at 5:49 AM.