Sunday, May 24, 2009
Montiglio tells us that Athenian orators of the fourth century, in contrast to Homeric public speakers, "want their voices to be made of a pure disembodied logos, and not of a powerfully resonant substance. . . .From being ligeia, their voice has become lampra (luminous)" (Silence, p. 148). She recapitulates and expands on ligus:
[I]n epic poetry ligus modifies not only the voice of good speakers, but also the song of the Sirens and the dirge of the Muses, thus associating different forms of expression on account of their clear and powerful resonance. As regards speakers, there is no incompatibility between the audible physicality of their voices and the clarity of their words. By contrast, in the classical age ligus is applied to specifically to kinds of music and utterances in which sounds prevail over words: the lovely melody of the aulos, but also, and more insistently, the voices of mourning.
(ibid.)
Ligus, Montiglio says, speaking still of the classical age, "describes voices that are cast at the margins of the city: that of the nightingale, a plaintive song reminiscent of barbarian rhythms; that of mourning women, like the Thebans who pour out their ritual cries over the dead, or like the Suppliants, barbarian women similar to nightingales, who cry out their lament with a barbarian voice"(pp. 148-149). The marginalization of voices ripples–no, the disturbance is deeper. Sundered from sound, wrenched from its body, the voice loses its capacity to legitimately express suffering in public spaces, paradoxically just as further suffering is imposed by force; subaltern dissent is stifled at the cost of a muted logos for everyone, and, consequently, a muted democracy. Passions, any passions, including the passions of the Muses, have become a threat to the web of orders: the political, the epistemic, the linguistic, the expressive, the noetic, all sustained now by not just a denial of vocal power but by a violent reification of speech and concomitant suppression of the real, a devaluing of the real in the economies of the recognized. Recognition. The irony of course is that the voice is the epitome of recognizable of personal expressions, gestures that tell who we are. If hearing consigns us the world and its contingency, as Cavarero says in echo of Jonas (For More than One Voice, p.37), then the deafness codified by excision of voices from the shared logos makes problematic any discussion of a shared world, except in the most rarified, least inclusive settings. I have to stop myself here. I don't want to rely on pre-established habits of thinking in order to assimilate what Montiglio has to say. The dematerialization of language means something to me personally, and I suspect the dematerialization of silence does as well. Silence feels.
Let's pick up again on Montiglio's discussion. Her interpretation of the conceptualizations of the vocal quality of ritual mourning is, naturally, informed by Nicole Loraux's study of ritual lament. She ties work to a conceptual dematerialization of the voice, and also, coincidentally, a dematerialization of the logos.
As Nicole Loraux has shown, the legal effort to reject the vocal expressions of mourning outside the public space is prompted by the political urgency to contain feminine lament, which supposedly upsets civic order by its unbridled affectivity. Accordingly, it is to be expected that the voice of the orator refuses to resemble these voices of lamentation: while the latter are all-sonorous, ligeiai, the former dematerializes by coinciding with the rational content that it conveys. In fact, lampros applies to the logos as well as to the speaker's voice; and persuasive speech, as Athena reminds us, is provided with eyes, with a gaze that emphasizes its rationality. This speech that wants to be manifest to the eye makes itself visible through an equally transparent medium: an immaterial voice, a pure "mirror of thought."
(pp. 149-150)
The nurturing of empathy leads to a realization that we not only acknowledge gaps in soulful encounters but that we feel our own impulse to respond to gaps. I speak now, to be critical of my own thoughts, from experience and from memory, which we may wish to regard in its physicality. Is luminosity an aspect of its physicality? Is it any less questionable for being embodied? Obviously I harbor doubts about the nature of my feelings, my impulses, my responses. Shall I cull the margins of the city for the secrets to my soul? How could that be empathy? Because it would represent a commitment to listening?
Labels: Cavarero, Greece, Jonas, Loraux, Montiglio, silence, voice
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
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Common sense tells us that of course the world can be thought. In the phenomenology of Renaud Barbaras, however, the question of whether the world can be thought is not so simply settled. To begin with, let's take a look at the conclusions Barbaras draws from his chapter on "living movement," which includes an incisive consideration of Bergson's Matter and Memory:
One cannot reintroduce in the subject a specific dimension by which it would relate to the totality as such, an ability to dominate the world and to determine it adequately–in short, something like a thought; on the contrary, it is with regard to such an approach (which is still Husserl's) that Bergson's analysis demonstrates its value. Insofar as it all-encompassing, the world is essentially what can neither be dominated nor adequately given, which is why it disappears from everything that manifests it. The negative character of manifestation is the correlative of the unpresentability of the world. It is therefore through living movement that we must grasp in a unitary way the possibility of the manifestation and that of the comanifestation of the world it negates; we can account for perception that is based on movement only on the condition of elucidating a sense of being proper to the motor subject in which are constituted conjointly the manifestation and the totality of which the manifestation is the negation. Moreover, to the degree that, as motor, the subject can circumscribe its object only within the phenomenal field and to the degree that the manifestation of the phenomenal totality as such cannot rely on a nonvital (extraworldly) dimension, we must conclude from this that the movement from which perception proceeds constitutes totality in the act by which it negates it and therefore that there is a positing of totality only as its own negation. We are not asserting here the view that totality is given only in forms in which it is negated, but rather that it is in its negation that the totality as such is posited, as if the part were to give rise to the whole of which it is a part. The perceiving subject is defined by the fact that the movement it unfolds opens onto the totality in the very act by which it negates it by determining it in the form of a concrete manifestation. We find ourselves here midway between Husserl's and Bergson's positions: if perception is indeed a condition of the world, this condition cannot be based on an autonomous psychic order, and it must therefore proceed from vital activity itself, so that it is indeed in movement itself that the world must be constituted, a world that movement considers as the field against the background of which its negating power unfolds.
(Desire and Distance, pp. 105-106)
Thus while the world can be thought, it does not originally appear because it is thought; the world is originally posited as such as the negative pole of a movement toward manifestation, toward something that is percieved. In this view, negation, (perhaps) metonomy, and intentionality are not psychic operations but rather qualities of living movement, actions of the body. Barbaras says that perception is intentional because of its motility, i.e., not because of the intervention of a consciousness that is itself necessarily intentional (p. 101). In no uncertain terms he claims that "perceptual manifestation ultimately arises from the strict relation between a movement and a phenomenal field, and it is by no means necesssary to introduce any psychic reality whatsoever; the properly active moment of perception in which the autonomy of a subjectivity is confirmed resides in motility, which is why perception as such is indifferent to the division between the psychic and the corporeal" (p. 97).
Barbaras makes the case that movement forms part of the essence of perception (p. 89). That's not so difficult to grasp. However, to make his case against the introduction of a psychic reality, his argument depends on the reverse holding true, the idea that perception forms part of the essence of movement. (We've already looked at the problem of linking worldhood directly to motility; Barbaras and Jonas are on similar ground here, both dealing with the philosophy of the living organism and, ultimately, the relationship between movement and desire; and both seem to have a view of living movement that doesn't adequately explain the existence of the amoeba– it could be accounted for by a theory of semovience, but there is this problem of determining what is and what isn't psychic.) Barbaras' characterizes (living) movement thusly:
[M]ovement itself refers to the object on the basis of a mode that is irreducible to an objective and mechanical displacement; it is familiar with the object–there is perception within movement. It does not involve a perception distinct from it that would guide it or subsist in it in an implicit or unconcsious way. Such an interpretation is rooted in an inability to conceive of experience other than on the basis of psychic contents, foreign to the order of exteriority (in other words, in an inability to recognize the autonomy of appearance.) In truth, it is movement itself that perceives in the sense that the object exists for it, in which movement has its meaning, as its oriented nature attests, inspired and clairvoyant with regard to the living movement that often demonstrates an intimacy with its objective, an intimacy that runs deeper than that which knowledge exhibits. In an by movement the object appears, though without its manifestation being separated from its brute presence, according to the indistinctness between its essence and its existence. Here the grasp of the object is not distinguished from the gesture made toward it; perception takes place in the world and not in me, and the object is therefore perceived where it is. We are confronted with a strictly motor perception that unfolds exclusively in exteriority and rejoins rather than represents the object.
(pp. 91-92, Barbaras' emphases)
"Paradoxically," Barbaras says, following Bergson, "to say that image is for me is to say that it is itself, that it is distinguished from the totality" (p. 101). Are we therefore being asked to conceive of the world on the basis of a paradox? These two questions are not unrelated: Is the world as it originally appears the product of a thought, and can the world be thought at all? But if common sense continues to insist that the world can be thought, even on the basis of a paradox, are we not still left with the question of whether or not the world itself is thought? That is, of course, if Barbaras is simply wrong.
Barbaras points to the inexhaustability of perception (an idea we have briefly encountered before), and he links this to movement, to an "excess beyond the self" and to the "infinite excess of ability beyond action" (p. 95). I still maintain a healthy skepticism of the concept of excess (Dyadic Excess), and in this case I am much more inclined to regard movement as prone to exhaustion than thought, if those are indeed the alternatives. I have had experiences of being totally exhausted by thought, and of my thinking being exhausted. Along with the nightmarish prospect that thinking never rests (The Rhythm of Thinking), I must now consider the possibility that the living subject never sleeps nor rests, that it is constantly in movement. Can this really be the meaning of semovience? Well, if it is, then it just may follow that the world is unthinkable in its original form, because it is always at every conceivable moment of experience present before it can be thought. Hmm.
Labels: Barbaras, Bergson, body, Jonas, motility, perception, phenomenology, rest, semovience, thinking, world
Friday, June 22, 2007
Barbaras quotes from the following passage in Jacques Derrida's Speech and Phenomena:
Later, in his "Nachwort zu meinen 'Ideen,'" and in the Cartesian Meditations (§§ 14 and 57), Husserl will again briefly invoke this "precise parallel" between the "pure psychology of consciousness" and the "transcenendental phenomenology of consciousness." And in order to deny that transcendental psychologism which "makes a genuine philosophy impossible" (Cartesian Meditations, § 14), he will then say that at all costs we shall have to practice the Nuancierung ("Nachwort," p. 557) which distinguishes the parallels, one of which is in the world and other outside the world without being in another world, that is, without ceasing to be, like every parallel, alongside, right next to the other. We must stringently assemble and protect in our discourse these frivolous, subtle (geringfügigen), "seemingly trivial nuances" which "make a decisive difference right and wrong paths (Wege und Abwege) of philosophy" (Cartesian Meditations, § 14). Our discussion ought to incorporate and protect these protected nuances and thereby at the same time consolidate in them its own possibility and rigor. But the strange unity of these two parallels, that which refers the one to the other, does not allow itself to be sundered by them and, by dividing itself, finally joins the transcendental to its other; this unity is life. One finds out quickly enough that the sole nucleus of the concept of psychē is life as self-relationship, whether or not it takes place in the form of consciousness. "Living" is thus the name of that which precedes the reduction and finally escapes all the divisions which the latter gives rise to. But this is precisely because it is its own division and its own opposition to its other. In determining "living" in this way, we come to designate the origin of the insecurity of discourse, precisely the point where it can no longer assure its possibility and rigor within the nuance. This concept of life is then grasped in an instance which is no longer that of pretranscendental naïveté, the language of day-to-day life or biological science. But if this ultratranscendental concept of life enables us to concieve life (in the ordinary or the biological sense), and if it has never been inscribed in language, it requires another name.
(Speech and Phenomena, pp. 14-15, emphasis Derrida's)
I'm not sure that Derrida is right that the phenomenological idea of life requires another name. (I'll explore Barbaras' thinking on the topic in a later post.) We already have bios and zoë, a distinction that doesn't necessarily index a rigorous grappling with reality. No, it's quite possible that phenomenologists and biologists simply disagree about the meaning of "life." I'm not sure that all biologists even share the same understanding of what life is. Is a virus alive? I'm aware of the argument, put forward forcefully by Hans Jonas (see this post), among others, that the ultratranscendent concept of life enables us to conceive of life at all, but I have yet to be convinced that this argument must be true. In weighing in against clutter, I may also be tipping my hand against nuance. Ultimately I believe that phenomenology should engage and directly compete with the natural sciences, even if it means that phenomenology is shown to be inadequate. There's only so much that nuance can accomplish in such a situation, before it risks becoming a means of obfuscation and avoidance.
Labels: Barbaras, biology, Derrida, Husserl, Jonas, life, phenomenology
Thursday, June 07, 2007
If we hold the view that consciousness is unique, what does that entail about the phenomenon of language? Does it mean that language that is no mere thing? This is one of the questions that arises from Merleau-Ponty's introduction to Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. Merleau-Ponty says that language "cannot be observed or grasped directly; it can only be exercised" (p. 6). Possibly he is completely wrong about this. Does rejecting this idea imply that we are bound to an idea of universal thought, to a sense of thinking that is not unique?
I was surprised to see Merleau-Ponty cite the work of Wolfgang Köhler (whose The Mentality of Apes I've just requested from the library.) Merleau-Ponty describes the anthropomorphism of Köhler's approach as "indispensable," because it ensures that "the life of the animal will not be reduced to the behavior that is under observation" (p. 9). Merleau-Ponty's brief defense of anthropomorphism reminded me of Hans Jonas, but I'd like to focus for a moment on what anthropomorphism means for the problem Merleau-Ponty has asked us to consider. If we can acquire a knowledge of language that may be described as intersubjective, must we resort to anthropomorphism? If we hold that language cannot be observed directly, it would appear that there is no other option. But is there another reason to favor an anthropomorphic method? Does the problem of the infant compel us to think anthropomorphically? (Now I am wondering to what extent Daniel Stern's work relies on anthropomorphism; does the problem of infancy necessarily lead one to imagine the subjectivity of the infant, and raise all the issues associated with such an imagination?)
Is language essentially mysterious, as Merleau-Ponty suggests? If language is a mere thing, does this mean that there is concievably a limit on the things that can insightfully be said about it? The ambiguousness of language is hardly deniable, but is it more or less swept under the rug by certain assumptions about what language is? If language is mysterious, then can we expect that judicious anthropomorphism may be in some instances demystifying, or would that merely compound the mysteries rather than solve them?
Labels: anthropomorphism, infant, Jonas, Köhler, language, Merleau-Ponty, Stern, uniqueness
Monday, March 19, 2007
Jonas claims that motility, perception and emotion distinguish animals from plants (p. 99). The problem as I see it, however, is how to distinguish animals from other motile, hetertrophic, eukaryotic organisms. I have no clue as to what the actual taxonomy of eukaryotes should look like, but it seems clear that motility and hetertrophy are more primitive than perception and emotion which are clearly evident in only one lineage. Since Jonas has made such an example of the amoeba, I'm dissapointed that he ignores the amoeba when he ties the emotional life of animals directly to motility and hetertrophy, as if all of these characteristics emerged at once in a single lineage. If I'm going to have any use for Jonas' thinking on this topic, I'm going to have to revise and restructure his argument to account for the protozoa.
The autotrophic organism, according to Jonas, doesn't quite have a world. (p. 100). Its environment is directly contiguous with it.
From this original fact of life's having commerce with an environment we should exclude all premature suggestion of the duality of subject and object. The original condition is an environment contiguous with the organism: in this stage environment is nothing but the immedieate surroundings with which the chemical interchanges of metabolism take place. This situtation of material contiguity means also continuity in the process of exchange and thus immediacy of satisfaction concurrent with the permanent organic need. In this condition of continuous feeding there is no room for desire
(p. 102)
So the sunflower, in Jonas' view, doesn't know desire, doesn't relate to things as objects, and, although it has a vital identity, it doesn't have a reflective self and concomittantly it doesn't really relate to a world. If Jonas is right that only animals have a passionate existence (p. 106), or, to be exact, "passionate being," it can't be for the reasons he adumbrates, because by his reasoning the protozoa would also have to be thought of as passionate, even though they lack the ability to percieve or the mechanical means of transmitting feelings.
Does the amoeba after all have a world? Does it relate to objects in its environment even though it lacks the means to percieve them? Is the subject-object duality contingent upon motility, heterotrophy, or upon perception? Jonas views mediacy as the key attainment of the animals, but in the record of life there appear to be different kinds or stages of mediacy–Jonas is not altogether consistent; he recognizes that mineral relations are even less mediate than a plants' relations to its environment (p.107), so in the end it appears to be a question of degrees, and this is a problem for the analysis of mediacy, self-transendence and the notion of activity, an organism's capacity for action over and above basal metabolism, which is in a sense an emotional capacity that Jonas ascribes to animals but not to plants.. What then can we really make of the emergence of mediacies in the history of life, since there has apparently been more than one evolutionary event leading to the kind of impassioned mediacy that Jonas asks us to observe in animal life? Can biology tell us whether an amoeba has a world? If a world is a phenomenon of life, is it the sort of phenomenon that exists prior to and in some cases independently of perception or sentience? If we allow that the amoeba relates to a world rather than simply being in contact with its environment, does this open the door to considering that the sunflower also has a world? On what grounds do we say that the sunflower's movements don't add up to motility? We could adopt a special definition of motility that applies only to animals but not to protozoa, but this doesn't really solve the problem that Jonas creates by linking worldhood directly to motility. Alternatively we could say that Jonas is simply wrong about perception and emotion being coeval with motility, and wrong about the origins of worldhood. However, it does make sense to see worldhood as a elaboration of motility. So either the amoeba has a world, or the elaboration of motility that leads to worldhood happened only once. This puzzles me. How do we imagine nature such that freak occurrences and phylogenetic trends equally belong to nature? (I'm completely ambivalent about the whole issue of teleology. So it goes.)
Labels: amoeba, environment, Jonas, motility, world
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
For Hans Jonas the beginning of life marks an ontological revolution in the history of matter (The Phenomenon of Life, p. 81). Unlike the particle, or an event structure such as a wave that can be described mathematically, the living organism possess a form that is a function of its metabolism and cannot be explained by reducing it to its material constituents. The living organism has a world and a corresponding interiority. It is self-transcendent, spatially and temporally extending beyond its own immediacy (pp. 84-85.) Jonas sees in the organism a primary dialectic of freedom and necessity; he sees this as not merely an aspect of the human condition, but an aspect of the cosmos, an aspect of being since the ontological revolution that is life.
In Jonas' view the emergence of life rather than the emergence of consciousness represents the greatest challenge to thought. This focus creates an interepretive problem. Jonas believes that the amoeba's conation can be reasonably infered based on our own human experience of being a living body, but that to make the same inference for the particle would be unwarranted anthropomorphism (pp. 81-83). He writes that "the teleological structure and behavior of [the] organism is not just an alternative choice of description: it is, on the evidence of each one's own organic awareness, the external manifestation of the inwardness of substance. To add the implications: there is no organism without teleology; there is no teleology without inwardness; and: life can be known only by life" (p. 91). Thus while Jonas regards lifeless matter as an abstraction, as something that doesn't quite fully exist, he does yet believe in substance, a property of living, concrete being. Is there a paradox here, in that the organism, particularly the autotroph, relies on something that doesn't concretely exist? I'm not sure, though I find it telling that Jonas' preferred example of the primitive organism is the amoeba, a hetertrophic protozoan. In any case, Jonas' belief that life is only intelligible to the living requires the exercise of a judicious anthropomorphism, or zoomorphism. Once we allow for making inferences based on our own experience, what limits do we accept on our use of such inferences?
I've already touched on the possibility that Jonas is wrong with respect to protozoa and what kind of dent (if any) that might put in his panpsychism. But what if he's correct? Did consciousness emerge historically by building on what was already present, not in raw matter, but in the being of the organism? What connection is there between metabolism and consciousness? Are self, world, and temporality all prior to the existence of consciousness? How much can we really say about a vital identity without relying on shoddy inferences? We'll see if Jonas has anything to say on the topic when I turn to his next chapter, "To Move and to Feel: On the Animal Soul."
Labels: amoeba, Jonas, life, ontology, panpsychism
Friday, March 09, 2007
Jonas' review of the ontological implications of Darwinian evolutionary theory leads him to the position, hedged but clearly proposed, that inwardness is coexstensive with life (The Phenomenon of Life, p. 58). This notion that subjectivity begins with the membrane again raises the question of whether my philodendron in any way experiences its life, whether it has a soul or whether only animals have something that can be called be a soul. In either case, it appears that life on earth has generated a wide variety of forms of psychophysical unity, and the belief that subjectivity is something that belongs to humanity alone cannot be sustained.
If inwardness is merely coexstensive with Animalia, what's the difference between inwardness and fins, or opposable thumbs? We'll for one thing in inwardness we're looking at something far more primitive. The flagellates, more primitive than Animalia, are heterotrophic and motile–but how could a flagellate possibly feel its own motility? And yet how could it not know where it is going? This is puzzling. Only animals, with the exception of Phylum Porifera, have nerve tissues, giving them a means to feel that we can clearly understand. I don't know how much this matters to Jonas. If it were true that only "higher" mammals had subjective experiences of living, I think he would still argue that inwardness is a reality that belongs to life. Given the huge variety of eukaryotes that never evolved into animals, I'm hesitant to see things that way. Perhaps inwardness truly is freakish, the flowering of a single improbable mutation. Once inwardness exists, though, can it be understood mechanistically? Jonas thinks not, and this is for him is an essential difference between inwardness and other, anatomical features that have evolved over the aeons.
If inwardness cannot be understood mechanistically, it may still be understood evolutionarily, or in a way that's at least consistent with evolutionary theory. Jonas calls evolutionism the "apocryphal ancestor" of modern existentialism (p. 47) because it did away with the notion of the immutable species and introduced the idea that the condition is constituitive of the existent. Life doesn't occur simply within the boundaries of the organism, but in its habitat, in the organism's specific relations to its environment (p. 46). Inwardness was in no way forseen by the amoeba, Jonas argues, but it was elicited over the aeons in the flux of the vital situation (pp. 46-47). In other words, natural selection is the agency responsible for the emergence of inwardness, and inasmuchas natural selection belongs to the whole of life and not to the internal dynamics of particular organisms, which merely produces variations but does not select which will thrive, the outcomes of natural selection belong to the whole of life. If I've understood Jonas correctly, the vital situation is not simply something that bears on how an organism makes a living, to use the popular metaphor, but rather how it comes to exist at all in nature.
Labels: environment, evolution, Jonas, natural selection, panpsychism, philodendron, psyche
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
The living body, Hans Jonas says, is the memento of the question "What is being?" (The Phenomenon of Life, p. 19). Whereas in Jonas' view the worlds of matter and of thought are both equally abstractions, the living body is concrete, and only on the basis of its concreteness and authenticity can ontology free itself from the deadening impact of the dualistic antithesis (p. 22). Although Jonas does not cite Maine de Biran, his thinking about the living body seems to be indebted to the French philosopher. He argues, against Kant, that causality is not a category of the understanding, not an a priori basis of experience, but rather is itself a basic experience, an experience rooted in "the effort I must make to overcome the resistance of worldly matter in my acting and to resist the impact of worldly matter upon myself. This happens through and with my body, with its extensive outwardness and its intensive inwardness at once, which both are genuine aspects of myself. And advancing from my body, nay, myself advancing bodily, I build up in the image of its basic experience the dynamic image of the world–a world of force and resistance, action and inertia, cause and effect" (p.23, emphasis Jonas'). I'll return to the issue of anthropomorphism here, but first I want to point out that this line of thinking about effort emerges in response to Hume.
Hume admits that "the animal nisus, which we experience, though it can afford no accurate precise idea of power, enters very much into that vulgar, inaccurate idea, which is formed by it." This admission comes in a footnote to a paragraph that reads:
We may, therefore, conclude from the whole, I hope, without any temerity, though with assurance; that our idea of power is not copied from any sentiment or consciousness of power within ourselves, when we give rise to animal motion, or apply our limbs to their proper use and office. That their motion follows the command of the will is a matter of common experience, like other natural events: But the power or energy by which this is effected, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable.
(See also Brandon's post on Hume's dismissal of animal nisus.) So is nisus unknown and conceivable, does it enter into a vulgar and innacurate idea, or is it rather, following Maine de Biran, immediately and incontestably known? Jonas takes the latter view, a way of thinking that leads him to a defense of anthropomorphism.
Are causes, including final causes, a part of nature? Jonas sees natural science's prejudice against teleology as but a phase in science's struggle against anthropomorphism (p. 36). If causality belongs to human nature, will natural science go so far as to alienate the human being from his own nature, to deny that the experience of effort has meaning (p. 37)? Alternatively, could natural science embrace anthropomorphism?
Perhaps, rightly understood, man is the measure of all things–not indeed through the legislation of his reason but through the exemplar of his psychophysical totality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness known to us: a completeness from which, reductively, the species of being may have to be determined by way of progressive ontological subtraction down to the minimum of bare elementary matter (instead of the complete being constructed from this basis by cumulative addition). The question is still open whether life is a quantitative complexification in the arrangement of matter, and its freedom and puposiveness nothing but an apparent blurring of its simple, unambiguous determinacy through the massed complexity as such (a fact of our bafflement rather than of its own nature)–or whether, contrariwise, "dead" matter, as one extreme of a spectrum, represents a limiting mode of the properties revealed by feeling life, their privative reduction to the near-dwindling point of inchoateness: in which case its bare, inertial determination would be dormant, as yet unawakened freedom. The ontological justification for this question lies in the fact that the living body is the archetype of the concrete, and being my body it is, in its immediacy of inwardness and outwardness in one, the only fully given concrete of experience in general.
(pp. 23-24, emphases Jonas')
Whew. Jonas' ontological argument appears solid to me, but it's hard to imagine that natural science will realign itself to follow an anthropomorphic ontology. What science demands of its theories is that they explain more or explain better than established theories. (I had a similar sort of reaction to Grace de Laguna's foray into biology in On Existence and the Human World.) It will be interesting to see how Jonas develops the anthropomorphic idea as he tackles evolution, metabolism, DNA and other well studied topics in biology.
Labels: anthropomorphism, body, de Laguna, Hume, Jonas, Maine de Biran, 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