Monday, November 10, 2008
Michel Henry's Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body is difficult to find, and of course it's a whole book and many people have little time for whole books. Fortunately, then, Michael Tweed has been working on a translation of Henry's The Living Body which is a nice, provocative little bit of philosophy. I think.
Some jots.
If life belongs not the order of what appears but to appearing itself, as Henry maintains, does it quite follow that Heidegger is wrong about Dasein providing our access to life for the reason Henry provides, namely that Dasein is primarily being-in-the-world, which he takes to mean something like "being-in-the-horizon-of-what-appears" in contradistinction to something like "being-in-a-horizon-of-appearing"? Does life itself, or, perhaps better said, life in its very appearing, have horizons? Henry asserts that life is fundamentally acosmic, but I throw it out there as a question. As you mull over that question you may see why I am not as quick as Henry to see that biology has radically, completely and irrevocably bracketed out the study of life. (Can this be the most generous reading of François Jacob's comment that what is studied in the modern biological laboratory isn't life itself?) Rather I see questions, uncertainties, opacities or even confusions, but not a science of life settled on any particular definition or non-definition of life. Of course I haven't settled on any idea of what it means to be worldly, to have a world, or to have horizons, so my question of life's horizons may be a hinky question from any angle.
If we are to make a distinction between what appears and appearing itself, does relation belong originarily to appearing? (Equiprimordially?) Must we be free to relate? (I've been struggling to give "existence" an existential meaning.) Only a being who could freely relate, who could free itself to relate, could interpret the relations of another being as relations. To reiterate Jonas' dictum, only life can understand life. But wait, Henry tells us. "[T]he ego is free, only on the inherent ground of a me that necessarily precedes it, i.e. on the ground of this Self generated in the self-engendering of life, in other words given to itself in the self-givenness of life." Life is passive before it is free.
Only life can understand life. Am I reduced now to repeating platitudes? Modern biology doesn't imagine itself as an anthropomorphic science, but that doesn't mean that in actual practice it doesn't know things by way of an anthropomorphism that would contradict its self-image, were it brought to light and interrogated, or indeed, its paradigms, which we will not confuse with foundations. What does anthropos contribute to understanding? What is our existence that is not a bacterium's? Is it a privative interpretation, or indeed by way of a corruption of human existence that we come to understand life through human existence? Why don't we say that we think biomorphically, or psychomorphically? Well, sometimes we say "zoomorphic" and mean "in the shape of a particular animal." Do we also mean something like "animistically," thinking in the shape of animals. Monstruation. Kaleideation. Why not also with the shape of our whole soul? What is the shape of bios? A narrative? Does that cover all the bases? What is the shape of life in its very appearing? Well, Henry argues for a fundamental passivity of life. This would rule out projections, shapes and, I think, freedom, as means of grasping life. Life simply isn't grasped in Henry's view, or, as he says, it isn't visible.
Is this still phenomenology? Life, Henry says, "phenomenalizes itself in its phenomenality and according to this phenomenality." What can be said about a mode of understanding that isn't also a grasping? In speaking of a mode of understanding are we going around Henry illicitly? Yet could it be that he means to block understanding?
Some things about my life are just perplexing. "To be born does not mean coming into the world, to be born means coming into life," Henry says. I never know what to make of my natality. In truth I feel that I was brought into this existence, this worldly existence, borne into it, that I didn't just appear ex nihilo. On the other hand I have no memory of my conception. My earliest memories do just appear ex nihilo, it seems. In them I am walking, all by myself. Should we never depend on other people for our memories?
Henry reverses himself: "we do not come into life, it is life that comes into us." By "us" does he mean Dasein?
Is there a philosophy beyond questions? What would be the relationship between worldlessness–a non-chaosmos at that–and being beyond questions, and what, if anything, would looking into that relationship tell us about worlds or about questions? What is the way of existing of the question?
Labels: Heidegger, Henry, Jacob, Jonas, life, Tweed, world
Friday, July 11, 2008
Antonio Calcagno's critique of Henry's phenomenology would be a must-read if only for his position that life "must be understood as an a posteriori abstraction drawn from my natural experiences of myself dwelling in the world" ("Michel Henry's Non-Intentionality Thesis and Husserlian Phenomenology," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 39, No. 2, May 2008, p. 125). Should we question the attitude that tells us which experiences are natural and which might possibly not be? Anyway, as part of my ongoing struggle with the idea of transcendence, I admit I am unsure about what to make of a parcelling out of ideas into transcendence on the one side and experience (the empirical) on the other. More abstractly my concern may well be with priority (which I am thoroughly comfortable calling it into question) or, even more abstractly, narrativity. Why should the truth of experience be anything like a narrative–and by "truth of experience" I probably mean anything I should want to say about it? Surely there is more to saying than narrative, and, without denying narration its due, I object to all attempts to limit the saying of experience to narration. Well, Calcagno apparently has Henry's number, and his passing of the question of life through subjectivity and intersubjectivity as an ethical matter (he sometimes reads Husserl through Stein, as might be expected) merits our admiration, but I'm going to set all that aside for a moment to think about givenness, with Calcagno's guidance, and what may or may not be an ontological difference prior, perhaps, to any phenomenology.
Husserl does give an account of what is prior and what is conditional for phenomenology to operate successfully by admitting that there is a givenness not only about things as they appear to consciousness but also a givenness about consciousness itself. Edith Stein describes the givenness of consciousness as a Komplexbildung that consists of continually given lived-experiences. Husserl does not give a complete and systematic phenomenology of givenness not because his project is incomplete, but more because he realizes that there are certain realities that cannot be accounted for. In this way, Husserlian givenness must be understood as a first principle that admits a gap. We start there, but as with any principle, we cannot give a full account of its status without undermining its foundational properties. Givenness is a starting point, and the limits of human understanding cannot speculate as to why or how it comes to be operates. Any attempt to give an account of givenness other than as first principle is to lapse into a realm that transcends human understanding, namely, speculative metaphysics or theology.
(p. 118, my bold)
Would it be possible to lapse into an empirically reachable reality from the breach (while remaining ambivalent about the precise timing of the admittance of ἀρχαί)? Does the breach elapse? I don't see why we shouldn't continue to investigate its extensivity, which might perhaps be the substrate of a lapse.
A question about the fictility of existence: does a Komplexbildung have a narrative beginning, or anything like a narrative structure?
Oh, if we say Komplexbildung floats on indeterminacy what have we added to the discussion? In one aspect indeterminacy is the soul of gifting, but I would be wary of making of it a first principle.
For Hagège the word is the ἀρχή of exchange. Is he wrong? Not only is he not wrong in any absolute sense (we could never rule it out), he could almost be talking about the breach. Exchange, or gifting, is the manner of the breach's lapse into the reachable.
We offer the breach up for exchange. Have we ever expected so much of extension? Enough to surprise?
What first principle would a Bildung admit and still remain something like a formation; what happens to Bildung im Bildungsgang without which it would never happen at all? Habitation?
Does sequence describe anything real? Perhaps, or perhaps it aids in our descriptions, but we should be wary of thinking gifting can be adequately described without attending to its rhythms, and, while temporally patterned (in other words amenable to descriptions in terms of sequences), rhythms, as patterns, may yet disrupt the idea of firstness, or mosdef firstness as foundational. A Komplexbildung of polysequentialities, one consistent with the burst of the synkairotic, though it may indeed be a fact of life, has yet to be imagined.
A difference between the breach and the ἀρχή: the ἀρχή opens by closure; the breach is perpetually open to disruption; it can't properly be undermined because the habitation it inaugurates (as if every month were August) is not founded but rather found, a habitation amid and betwixt the open.
At the risk of becoming tiresome, my position is that we lapse into storytelling–a move towards particular human understandings rather than the be all and end all of understanding–by starting with the ἀρχή. Once we identify that lapse, it becomes difficult to say that the lapse and (or on account of) its logic, namely narrative, didn't in fact precede the ἀρχή, which is of course a contradiction of any claim to firstness, or at best a paradox of priority (that it would pose there being a division into priority and posteriority prior to any emergence of the prior). So in posing the breach as an alternative to the ἀρχή we open narration to questioning by setting aside priority. We want to know if the breach lapses into anything knowable. We want to know if the breach elapses at all. My sense is that it does, but we limit ourselves by allowing narrative or priority as a narrative trope to dominate our apprehensions of its elapsing. We may then have been mistaken in equating the logic of the lapse with narrative generally, although in particular lapses from ἀρχαί may occur according to a logic of narration. When I call a step "preliminary" or "inaugurating" I don't mean to embark on a foundational discourse. (The step is another way of saying lapse, what is admitted to by the breach.) If this commits me in some measure to narrative, it doesn't prevent me, I think, from lapsing. Instead of telling the story of a givenness (e.g. ontological difference), we might rather be in touch with a gifting. The breach is that being in touch.
Labels: Anaximander, Calcagno, Claude Hagège, gift, givenness, Henry, Husserl, ontological difference, Stein, Thales
Sunday, June 22, 2008
We must be grateful to Michael Tweed for his translation of Michel Henry's article, "What is Meant by the Word 'Life.'"
How can we place sidedness before appearing?
Let's try to think of throughness as four-dimensional, as temporally and spatially ex-tended. (Is this starting off on the wrong foot? Could we simply say that we want to imagine throughness as having to do with temporality and not mean something like see it as being extended through (ahem) time?) Does throughness have its sidedness, its hithers and yons, befores and afters? Does throughness pass through its own sidedness?
Can we think passage thoroughly without thinking it phenomenologically?
Henry, If I read him correctly, makes an argument for the transcendence of Life, which we glimpse in passing: "What does 'passing' signify if everything is here and does not cease to be here in the indissoluble bond of self-affection to itself, if what passes does not separate from itself, if what passes is life remaining in itself?" As I see it this thought is contradictory as long as Life is imagined to be invisible, as beyond appearance and therefore beyond sidedness–but I put forward this idea as a question because it appears as if serious thinkers (as Henry surely was) may be putting sidedness forward before phenomenality, and therefore transcendence before phenomenality, and I reckon there must be reasons for that, or some angle on it that I am not seeing.
Labels: Henry, life, transcendence, Tweed
Friday, June 20, 2008
Although we share vocabulary and interests, what I should want to say about language should not be confused with what Michel Henry says in "Material Phenomenology and Language (or, Pathos and Language)" (trans. Leonard Lawlor, Continental Philosophy Review 32:343-365, 1999).
There are no languages that we know of which are not languages of the world. This statement remains true under several different hypotheses about the world or different definitions of "world." The phenomenological epoché does not deny the existence of what is known in everyday speech as "the real world" or in some jargons as "the material world." The epoché merely suspends belief in "the real world," which is to say it delays answering a question of such a world's existence, a question of whether such a world might be the world, the world itself, or whether the things of and in this everyday world might possibly be the things themselves. This delay of the question about "the real world" does not mean that the epoché occurs in the absence of a world. The world that is given with phenomenality which appears through the epoché may be designated as the lifeworld–be warned: I am not reciting phenomenological doctrine here but rather offering an opinion. I have raised all kinds of questions about this phenomenal world and how it is given (for instance, might it be given as chaosmos), but, whatever its attributes or character, I am inclined to regard the world that is given with phenomenality as apodictic. Here today I might say "lifeworld" in contradistinction to Henry who radically opposes Life and world if only, perhaps, to radically unite them again. There should be no need for such gestures, and in fact if we agree to suspend the question of the existence/nonexistence of "the real world" then we can just say "world." Do we posit that this phenomenally given world is not given as dead? Apodicitity is in actuality tough to come by. Things (life, death) may be given meontically. There may or may not be such at thing as ontological difference, which may or may not matter phenomenologically. The agent of the epoché may be given as radically different from his or her phenomenal world, or the things given within this world, if or insofar as "things" are given as things. Notwithstanding these proliferating doubts, we can still talk about the worldliness of languages, and at the very least distinguish a meaningful sense of language from either Henry's dead language of the world or his autorevelatory language of Life.
Nominalization (or reference) hardly begins to describe what language does or is. Reference is petty. Unconcealing is petty. This judgment is the basis of my profound disagreement with Henry. The language of the world is not indifferent: not to the things it names, nor to the world, nor to speakers nor listeners, nor to itself, nor to the operations, feelings, entities, assemblages nor intertwinements it brushes up against. This is of course a crude way of phrasing things. There are languages and there are worlds, and before we can ever come to a question of whether a language is its own world, which may not be to say that it is enclosed or isolated, we stumble across the question of what a language is (or does). We should probably say "does" at this point to give speaking precedence over Speech or Language (*language) though it may raise a question of whether the epoché says anything, whether it is speaking or speech, the saying or the said or an altogether different sort of operation.
"Language does many things" is the ordinary way of saying that *language is an assemblage of a multitude of operations. However, the latter phrasing is far from adequate. Language does not assemble by any additive process, but rather it operates algebraically and reflexively, that is, it enables its algebra to be turned on itself, which is never merely a question of an ability to refer. Language multiplies differences. I won't say that's all it does because I don't want the discussion to devolve into pettiness. The key argument here is that language does many things.
Pace Henry the mode of appearance of the language of the world is pathetic, or passionate. Pathos is not self-centered. Although passions involve the self, we cannot arbitrarily discount the other-orientations of passions. Passions are indeed, among other things, other-oriented. They are, to use a word that must be used, interipseitious. When I say the language of the world is passionate, I mean the logos, and I can be taken to mean that philosophy is felt. The interipseity of philosophy means this: that one delights in sharing the love of knowledge. (NB: I imagine myself as optimistic, not stupid.)
Taste an epiphany: I hear your birth as saying, saying something to me if you must have objects. Therefore I wouldn't speak of the "noise of birth" nor would I separate the cry from the real language of the world. It is not for nothing that I hear your existence. In following Adrianna Cavarero's recovery of the logos as phone semantike through to a conclusion that "[h]earing consigns us to the world and its contingency" (For More than One Voice, p. 37), and going one step further, I am consigned to our contingency, yours and mine together, which is given with the world. This is of course a crude way of phrasing things. There are many contingencies, many of us, many wes. The modalities of consignment are surely multitudinous and multifarious as well. For all of the multiplicities I am no less passionately consigned to our world, contingent as it is, and to our contingencies.
I have delayed the question of whether our contingent world corresponds to "the real world." It ceases to press upon me. I don't doubt that you exist, though I might be curious to know how you exist.
Does existence speak through us or do we speak through existence? In any case we speak to each other. If I wanted to speak of the materiality of language I would be speaking of voices and the interipseitious world in which they are heard, of the passionate consignment to our world and to our contingency. But no doubt I would be talking to you. Feel me?
Labels: Cavarero, Henry, intersubjectivity, language, passions
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
How does the philodendron on the shelf behind me exist? What's its phenomenality, if we can think about it that way? We've touched up against the idea that being and appearance coincide once or twice or more, but it's never been settled in my mind how this idea should be thought, much less how it might be critiqued. One flight path leads us to lived experience, well conceived, leaving us within the borders of a phenomenology though perhaps poised for a second departure into cosmobiology, or it leads us to the experience of living, which may take us beyond any phenomenology without fuss or pomp. May. Now let's look at how Michel Henry goes at the coincidence of being and appearance in his lapidary essay "Phenomenology of Life" (trans. Nick Hanlon, Angelaki, vol. 8, No. 2, August 2003, pp. 97-110). He says:
Another primary intuition of phenomenology is that appearing is more essential than being; it is only because it appears that a thing is able to be. To express this with Husserl, using a formula borrowed from the Marburg School (which I modify slightly): "Something is inasmuch as it appears [Autant d’apparaître, autant d’être]." I carry this precedence of phenomenology over ontology one step further by saying that it is only if the appearing appears in itself and as such that something, whatever it may be, can in turn appear, can show itself to us.
(p. 100)
I don't know French so I couldn't tell you the difference between the formulas "autant d’apparence autant d’être" and "autant d’apparaître, autant d’être," nor could I speak to differences between apparaître and comparaître, nor to similarities between disparaître and transparaître, nor to what any of this would have to do with reparaître, which may well be a final destination, though I won't cease to question it. Since Henry mentions the Marburg School I'll take this opportunity to reiterate that in my exploration of the experience of living the transcendental remains on hold, at least until I can figure out what it might mean, much in the same way the ontological difference remains on hold, though to be perfectly honest I've leaned against affirming any such thing. As I interpret this position, Henry is in fact giving precedence to phenomenality over phenomena and beings (phenomena-and-beings). So what meaning would be left for a coincidence of being and phenomenon?
When phenomenologists talk about consciousness—phenomenality is indeed about consciousness, about a grasping of Etwas als Etwas—we may be asked to set aside ordinary, psychologistic notions of subjectivity, interiority and such in light of this phenomenological understanding of the intentionality of consciousness. Well, is there anything about phenomenality that would compel us to hitch our wagons to transcendentalism? I'll tell you where Henry is going with this thinking about a phenomenology of life. He says, "no life can appear in the appearing of the world" (p. 101). Quite a claim. We'll look at his special definition of "life" in a moment, but I'd like to back up just a jot to see what pushes this idea forward. Henry says, "The very possibility of phenomenality becomes problematic if the principle of phenomenality escapes its grasp" (ibidem). Ah hah! Phenomenality has a grasp! On this much I can agree with Henry. But what is this notion of needing to grasp a principle (ἀρχή)? What could be prior to grasping and still remain with the realm of the phenomenal, or within phenomenality? Would the lifeworld be exactly a principle? In any case, Henry alerts us to a pitfall we should wish to avoid: reflexivity of consciousness leading to an infinite and ultimately pointless regression of consciousness about consciousness and so on. I should quote Henry more fully:
[H]ow does the intentionality which shows or makes visible every thing reveal itself to itself? Could it be by directing a new intentionality upon itself? If so, can phenomenology avoid the bitter destiny of that classical philosophy of consciousness which finds itself bound in an endless regression, obliged to place a second consciousness behind the knowing consciousness (in our case a second intentionality behind the one that we are attempting to wrest from obscurity)? Or else does a mode of revelation exist other than the showing of intentionality, in which phenomenality would no longer be that of the outside? Phenomenology has no answer to this question.
(ibidem, my bold)
Let's think about new intentionalities. Is (re)birthing a happy alternative to regression? (The idea of a rebirth is so fraught with connotations I'll briefly reaffirm my agnosticism, whether or not it matters much.) Is birthing an arche? Would it be transcendental birth and only transcendental birth that requires a grasp of its arche? Oh, the betrayals that follow from first principles. Would anarchic rebirthing really be any more or less of a betrayal of birth than transcendental birth is? Who gave birth to beyond? Would it be a betrayal of grasp to have no beyond, or, alternatively, to remove beyond from reach? Is the "I can" capable of comprehending all of the new intentionalities who are born? Does birth exhaust life?
This is what Henry says:
For we too are born of absolute Life. To be born does not mean to come into the world. Things appear for an instant in the light of the world before disappearing into it. Things are not "born." Birth concerns only living beings. And for these living beings, to be born means to come to be as one of these transcendental living Selves that each of us is. It is solely because we have first come into life that we are then able to come into the world.
(pp. 104-105)
Henry's thinking about life leads us to a familiar conundrum: in his view either my philodendron has feelings or it is not living. Indeed, he says "all modalities of life. . . are affective at their root" (p. 105). The thought seduces the existentialist side of the psyche, but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Henry takes from biology's difficulty in pinning down what exactly life means an opportunity to put forward a radical alternative:
[T]he appeal to sensation which can alone give access to reality hides within it an appeal to life, that is, to a radically different mode of appearing. Life is phenomenological through and through. It is neither a being [étant] nor a mode of being [être] of a being. This is not the life about which biology speaks. To tell the truth, modern biology no longer speaks about life. Since the Galilean revolution its object has narrowed to material processes compatible with those studied by physics. As François Jacob expresses it: "In today’s laboratories one no longer enquires about life."
(pp. 102-103)
Henry moves quickly from life as phenomenological to life as transcendental and absolute, from an idea of autorevelation to one of autodonation: "Absolute life is life which has the power to bring itself into life. Life "is" not, it happens and does not cease happening" (p. 104). However much we might want to run with an idea of ceaseless happening, we should be careful that we aren't betraying something or somebody we'd rather remain true to. Ourselves perhaps. Perhaps not. Isn't autodonation a poor substitute for birth—Hi, mom!—or indeed for donation?
Now I'm going to turn my thoughts to the philodendron on the shelf behind me, to its phenomenality, and to its appearance or lack thereof in my theatre of the phenomenal. I reckon there may be some slippage in the coincidence of the being and the appearance of the philodendron, because I don't maintain doubts about its existence when my eyes are turned away from it. I expect it to be there when I turn around. A wee bit of appearance seems to count for plenty of being—but what is a plenitude of being? Is appearance pregnant with being? Phenomenality? Timing. We have to have something like a synkairotic to allow the philodendron to have its say in our habits of phenomenality. Not that it says much. Maybe a wee bit. I don't know. Now I am suspicious of a perfectly synchronous coincidence of being and appearance.
To begin to answer my original question, how does philodendron on the shelf behind me exist? Not all at once. If becoming by birth is a how of its existence, the coincidence of this how with the how of its appearing would be synkairotic.
Labels: Henry, Jacob, life, natality, ontological difference, phenomenology, philodendron, transcendence
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Tengelyi, following Marc Richir, speaks of vibrations of sense exhibiting a constant surplus of meaning, a boundless multitude that can be referred to as apeiron (The Wild Sense, pp. 80-81). Presumably then Tengelyi would translate apeiron as "infinite." However, he says that the most significant characteristic of newly emerging shards of sense is their undecidedness (p. 85). What sort of temporality does the indefiniteness of sense in the making imply? Tengelyi reviews Husserl's idea of the primal impression as presented in the Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, and as interpreted by Emanuel Levinas and Michel Henry. (See Dylan Trigg's post here for a quick visualization of Husserl's analysis). Tengelyi is concerned with the primal impression's strangeness to consciousness, and its quality of initiality. In his interpretation of Husserl's analysis of temporality the quality of initiality is evident in the primal impression's disruption of "the order of time organized by intentionalities" (p. 59).
The time of the reality which becomes available as a destinal event gets unfolded along the lines of the conflict between. . . the retrospective and the progessive temporalization. Consequently, this reality appears as present which has never been future, since only after this reality has commenced and has thwarted the previous expectations do the expectations start to take any shape at all–those expectations which are able to harmonize with it.
(p. 84, Tengelyi's emphases)
In a similar vein, he argues that if time is determined by intertwinement of the exigency of the past and the promise of the future, Marc Richir's chiasmus of retention and protention, then a third thread must be added: the belief that reality may at any time rip up the texture of intentional time, creating a space for a present that has never been future because it conforms to neither exigency nor promise, but precisely thwarts. This belief is an "empty horizon" that, when a destinal event takes place, "will be rich in premonitions which can be grasped in their reminiscences" (p. 88).
So what does Tengelyi mean by "destinal event"? He also describes this as a radical turn in life history. I wonder if "critical event" wouldn't capture his meaning, but he means to understand the destinal event in terms of a process of sense formation and its temporality. The "radical turn" or "destinal event" in life history "designates a sense formation which starts by itself, takes place without any control, as if it happened "underground," creating, simultaneously, a new beginning in life-history" (p. 81, my lack of emphasis). Sense formation creates a new beginning in life history by shaking or shattering "the dominant sense fixations which carry our self-identity, thereby giving rise to a split in the self, while, simultaneously, it makes a new sense available, which in turn will make it possible to anchor self-identity anew" (p. 82, Tengelyi's emphases). Not every event of sense is capable of shattering a dominant sense fixation. To become a destinal event a new sense must cross a certain threshold of difference (p. 88). It must be not merely strange, but really strange.
I had begun to think, clumsily, that possibility was contained in practice. Another way of approaching the problem is to say that possibility is contained within the real, or, perhaps, that the real exceeds its possibility. Following Levinas, we can ask whether a reality that precedes every protention (a present that was never future) also precedes its possibility. Reality here is meant in a special sense. We might call it the strangely real.
The "real" (le réel): it is by no means accidental that this word is put between quotation marks. The "real" is not talked about in the sense of an ordinary realism. Primal impression proves to be "primal source," "primal generation," or "primal creation" insofar as it gains significance and prevails in opposition to the "spontaneity" of the intentionality of consciousness constituting time. This "in opposition" does not only express a kind of contrast but a belonging together as well. What is real for us is real in consciousness. Husserl is right: the idea of a reality independent of consciousness is the product of a mere abstraction, or even of our forgetting about ourselves. Yet he is still not right: consciousness reveals a reality which prevails in opposition to the interplay of the intentions of consciousness, thwarting all expectations, countering all designs, "preceding and surprising the possible"; in consciousness–to put it in another way–such a reality gets organized whcih declares its independence from consciousness in this very consciousness itself.
(p. 72, Tengelyi's emphases)
When Tengelyi speaks of the initiality and the undecideness of the really strange sense (my words) being submerged, buried or pushed aside, I can't help but think of the traumatic experience and the psychological strategies for coping with trauma. Tengelyi means, however, to emphasize the other side, as it were, of the newly emerged sense, the side that is met with initiative, undertaking and adventure. The to be open to the really strange in experience is to be ready for adventure, to be open to allowing one's fixations of sense to be shattered. Why not go the distance and claim that reality is strange, staking out an extraordinary realism of the undecided?
Husserl says that "where there is a new experience a new science must arise." Perhaps the really strange–I hesitate to say the impossibly strange–rather calls for a poetics; however, the estrangement of the real from the subject of sense formation suggests yet another approach may be necessary. We'll see whether Tengelyi's diacritical method of phenomenology sheds any light on the strangely real when we tackle his thinking on the experience of alterity.
Labels: Anaximander, Henry, Husserl, Levinas, phenomenology, Richir, strangeness, temporality, Tengelyi, Trigg
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Henry asks, "Can the problem of alientation in fact be posited otherwise than in a philosophy of the first person? Is there any meaning whatever in saying that a stone is alienated?" (Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 146). This has the makings of a paradox. Can the first person, strictly speaking, be alienated? Isn't that exactly the meaning of alienation, to be at once like a person and like a stone?
What exactly is the philosophical problem with switching voices? We do this all the time in our everyday speech, in inner speech as well as verbal discourse. For a phenomenologist like Henry, the problem is in moving from the certainty of the "I think" to the dubiousness of the existence of other entities. Would he say that it is philosophically wrong to reach an accomodation with dubiousness? What kind of life would that be, a life without dubiousness?
In this passage on alienation, Henry is at odds with the Freudian unconscious. Elsewhere he says that "the task of philosophy is not to denounce illusions but rather to justify them, at least by making apparent the foundation which makes them possible and the ontological structure from which they develop" (p. 115). I don't think Henry has made it his task to justify the unconscious, which he regards as illusory. I like phenomenology precisely because all of its realities are apparent, but I often wonder whether this is the whole story.
Labels: egology, Henry, phenomenology, the unconscious
Monday, December 18, 2006
Henry says that the immanent body and the transcendent body both have the quality of being mine (Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 115). He's obviously overlooking the possibility of being inhabited by a demon ego. When I reflect upon myself, how do I know that the mine that reflects and the mine that is reflected upon are in fact the same mine? If they are mine in different ways, which feels at least plausible, then I wonder about the possibility of at least one instance of mine not being properly and truly mine. Could my transcendent being belong to someone else? Or what if its my immanent being that really isn't mine? How horrible.
I'm joking of course, but there is a serious issue here. Henry says, "Because our objective body is only a representation of our original body, the problems which the duality of these two bodies poses and the unity of meaning which unites them are altogether analogous to the problems which stem from the relationships between the transcendent ego and the absolute ego" (p. 133). Pace Henry, and without the benefit of having read his Essence of Manifestation, this unity can be doubted, by the same stroke that separates the transcendent from the absolute egos, which, although essential to phenomenology, seems to have created a problem that wasn't there to begin with in the phenomenon of the ego. Or was it? Who exactly is the ego that can reflect upon himself?
Update. In a footnote to his Conclusion Herny says, "the objective transcendent body which we continually designate as 'ours', can obviously be that of another ego, which is what takes place in normal erotic life" (p. 216). Hmm.
Labels: egology, Henry, phenomenology
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Henry's phenomenological body is both spontaneity and habit: spontaneity insofar as it is absolute subjectivity, and habit insofar as is it a power of repetition. It is also memory, but memory of a peculiar kind: "it is because the body is memory, a memory, it is true, where the idea of the past does not yet arise, that it can also be a memory which remembers the past by making it the theme of its thought. The original memory of our body is habit, our body is, as we have said, the totality of our habits" (Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 101). For Henry, habit means the "real and concrete being of the ontological possibility." He says, "With regard to the world, it is the terminus of all our habits, and it is in this sense that we are truly its inhabitants. To inhabit, to frequent the world, such is the fact of human reality" (p. 96). (NB: I think "terminus" here has a specifically Biranian meaning.)
To frequent the world. Hmm. Here's a thesis that may clarify exacly where Henry is coming from: "Things are never present to the body in an experience which would bear within it the characteristic of having to be unique; rather they are always given to us as something which we will see again" (pp. 95-96). Always? That seems a little iffy. It does seem, though, to be the nature of the habitual.
One consequence of Henry's radical present, the realm of pure possibility, is that the faculty of assuefaction, to use Grassi's language, does not appear to be a problem for him. Habit is only ontological possibility, and the question of the acquisition of habits is neither here nor there.
Labels: body, Grassi, habit, Henry, Maine de Biran, memory, phenomenology
Saturday, December 16, 2006
What happens when we say "la la la la la"? Are we saying "la" five times, or is there a sense of doing one thing, saying "la la la la la"? If there's a sense of unity to saying "la la la la la," where does that come from? What kind of phenomenon is it?
A longish excerpt from Henry:
The determination of the original being of the body as subjective movement furnishes us with the principle of a phenomenology of memory whose possibility thus rests entirely on the ontological theory of the body. When a sound is heard, the sonorous impression is constituted, but the subjective movement in which the power of constitution here at work consists is originally known as such, because it is given to us in an internal transcendental experience. It is precisely the possession of the interior law of constitution of the sonorous impression which allows me to repeat this impression, to reproduce it myself again as many times as I care to, and to recognize it constantly in the course of this reproduction, because the knowledge of the power of constitution is immanent to its exercise and is one with it. That which repeats the sonorous impression is the body, and consequently, the ego–which amounts to saying that the power of constitution of the sonorous impression is the ego itself. As long as I repeat the sonorous impression, I know that I have already had the experience of this impression; I know that I now repeat it, that it is I who repeat it, and that it is the same impression of which I already had the experience which I now repeat. Actually, the remembering which is implied in this phenomenon is divided into a remembering of the power of constitution, a remembering which is the repetition strictly speaking, and a remembering of the sonorous impression which is a remembering of the repeated or reproduced terminus. The first remembering takes place on the level of transcendental immanence, it is produced without the intervention of any constitution and is known itself as such interiorly and immediately. The second type of remembering concerns the transcendent level on which the sonorous impression is constituted before being recognized and repeated there. To the first sort of remembering Maine de Biran gave the name "personal remembering," to the second the name "modal remembering."
(Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 80).
William James, by contrast, argues that strictly speaking it is impossible to hear the same sound twice (Principles of Psychology: Chapter IX, The Stream of Thought). James says the apprehension of sameness in the case of the repeated sound is a matter of referring two different sensations to the same object. It is impossible to hear two instances of the same sound with the same brain, because the brain is always changing. And so is experience. Experience for James is always in flux, "the river of life, the river of elementary feeling." What's true of hearing is also true of thinking. We can't experience the same idea twice, can't think two instances of the same idea with the same brain.
Yet we commonly do believe that we can think the same idea twice, or hear the same sound again. To explain this belief James credits language for an assist, and he speculates that if we spoke a more agglutinating language the tendency to believe we could think the same idea twice would be lessened. Having learned a couple of Bantu languages, albeit imperfectly, I don't quite buy it. I think it shows, however, how James may be failing to review all the options. If there is an assist factor, if there is something that helps us believe we can hear the same sound repeated, and grasp a unity there, it plausibly comes from a bodily capacity of remembering, from Biranian personal remembering.
Is personal memory then fundamentally illusory? Does it lend itself to illusion? The question, I think, is whether the power of constitution of sonorous impressions remains constant, or whether it is in flux, whether it develops or changes at all in the course of life. And what kind of constancy would we be talking about? Just enough to talk about what happens when we say "la la la la la"? More broadly it becomes a question of how memory works existentially.
James' view, which seems reasonable, is at least partially true to experience. I can acknowledge that every "la" is singular from the outset, but when I string together this "la" and that "la", "la la la la la," it feels like a repetition, and there is some sense of unity in it. And yet if I attend closely, the singularity of each "la" becomes apparent. What James says about the flux of experience seems to be true, but it also seems that he isn't telling the whole story. On the other hand, if we apply his insights to Henry's Biranian analysis, it seems that Henry has left some questions unanswered. At the end of the day, I can't say exactly what happens when we say "la la la la la."
Labels: body, experience, Henry, James, Maine de Biran, memory, repetition
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Does the Biranian body ever learn to do anything, or does it immediately know everything it knows about movement, everything it needs to know? Henry's Biranian children are like this, already knowing how to run and play. We say an ungulate hits the ground running, but in reality it takes a few minutes for the young ungulate to learn how to walk. What's going on in these first few moments? Does the ungulate learn to use its body, or does it learn its body in some non-instrumental way? If we accept the immediacy of the felt movement, how do we then account for the body's learning? So much of the human's ontogeny is given over to learning, I'd say the human body is the learned body par excellence, the body as it is learned. Can immediacy do justice to the body as it is learned?
Labels: body, Henry, learning, Maine de Biran
Some snippets from Henry's reading of Maine de Biran:
The determination of the being of the ego by the internal structure of a mode of manifestation truly has an ontological meaning; the positing which it accomplishes is not of "some thing," of a "being" in the sense that common or philosophical thought undestands it, viz. the positing of a being, because this "some thing" is rather constituted by its "how" and by the internal structure of its mode of manifestation.
Thus the designation of the being of the ego as identical to that of subjectivity signifies that, for Maine de Biran, the ego is not a being.
(Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 37.)
Henry will go further to say that the ego is not actually constituted. This is to be understood as a reading against Kant:
The category is identified in its original being with the very being of the ego; it is no longer possible for the latter to be a sort of object known by means of the category or constituted by it in any way whatever. The deduction has this primary consequence of tearing the being of the ego away from the sphere of transcendent being in general, which is always the product of a constitution. The ego, on the other hand, is not constituted, it cannot be so long as it is one in its being with the category, i.e. with the power of constitution in general, as long as it is itself such a power.
(p. 38.)
So the ego is not being, but it has ontological meaning, and Henry speaks of its "very being." Clearly Henry wants us to think of being in two different senses, one pertaining to the sphere of transcendence, the other pertaining to the sphere of absolute immanence. What about the question of the constitution of being? Is "constituted" to be taken in two different senses, or is this simply a contradiction?
One more passage:
The belonging of the categories to the sphere of the absolute immanence of subjectivity, which is also the sphere of the ego, leads us to the understanding of the fundamental relationship between the ego and ontological knowledge. Experience presupposes a condition of possibility which is ontological knowledge itself; the analysis of the categories is the bringing to light of the structure of this ontological knowledge. Philosophy begins with the questioning of such knowledge without which there would be nothing for us. But philosophy does not merit being called a first philosophy unless it takes this problematic as far as it can, and unless it deliberately takes up the task of determining in rigorous fashion the very being of ontological knowledge
.
(pp. 40-41.)
Recalling that Henry has already claimed that "experience is its own source," I now wonder whether Henry isn't talking about an inflected form of experience. Call it "experience on trial." Or maybe he simply contradicts himself. Or maybe I'm too oafish to appreciate his subtleties. In any case, it's going to be difficult for me to draw conclusions from his work.
Labels: experience, Henry, Maine de Biran, ontology, phenomenology
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Henry writes:
Against rationalism we must say that all knowledge is derived from experience because the condition for the possibility of experience is itself an experience. It is because the [Kantian] category was precisely for him an experience, and a specific experience, that Biran was able to circumscribe an absolutely original ontological region which, while being the source of all experience, was no less phenomenologically given and known.
(Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 25.)
Further:
Actually, what Maine de Biran requires of us is an identification of science with existence, i.e., an understanding that existence is already a science, not an imperfect or a provisional one, but the origin of all science, the origin of truth. The source of experience is not situated behind it but experience is its own origin.
(p. 26.)
This is like taking experience on faith. The argument "x is its own origin" precludes serious consideration of the question "How is x possible?" One might say that experience is different; experience is self-evident, not a matter of faith. But don't you still want to be able to ask, "How does experience come to be?" Naively, without any preconceptions. Isn't that a question worth asking?
Labels: experience, Henry, Maine de Biran, phenomenology
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Michel Henry asks:
Is not the fact that a consciousness has a body contigent fact, the contingent fact par excellence? Moreover, are we really in the presence of a fact? Rather, if the relationship sui generis of the body to consciousness rather proves to be the foundation of our idea of contingency, and more fundamentally, of the very fact that such a contingency and even contingent facts in general are possible for us, then does not this relationship truly constitute a structure, which is not only rooted in human nature, but which must further serve to define it?
(Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 2)
Where is Henry going with this? The question of the body leads toward a critique of the transcendental ego. Henry suggests that one way of proceeding is toward an existential realism that would have the courage to acknowledge and confront contingency, finitude and absurdity (p. 7). Another approach is to follow the Biranian discovery of the subjective body, the body which is an I. This latter approach is the path Henry will take.
Labels: body, contingency, Henry, Maine de Biran, phenomenology