Fido the Yak

Who poses the imaginary question? The imaginary question cannot be posed by the imagination without thereby becoming a "real" question, a realized question, a question that in an important respect no longer qualifies as imaginary. (I'm assuming that a question posed by one's inner voice is actually posed to oneself–though this self may also be imaginary, the imaginary addressee of imaginary questions. Perhaps this assumption, if we stick with it for a second, already mistakes the imaginary for the actual; however, there would still be a problem to think about with respect to the posing of an imaginary inner question.) The imaginary question would have to be posed by a consciousness capable of setting apart its imagination from its questioning. This merely states the obvious, yet we should wonder why should it be that we seem to body forth both the imaginary and the question with our entire existence, at least for a performative moment.

Let's ponder this moment. Is there some essential relation between the present moment and the question? Is the question tied to something like an event? The arousal of a curiosity, for instance. Is there any aesthetic moment of the curiosity prior to its being a curiosity about something? Might a curiosity about something be at once an aesthetic moment? In speaking of the event of the question, if we could completely erase an active consciousness from the equation, we should then be able to easily imagine the imaginary question. We could imagine the event of the question as easily as we can imagine a birthday party. Wait a second. Do we actually imagine a birthday party or do we imagine something like scenes from a birthday party, or do we merely imagine images from scenes from a birthday party which we piece together–quicker than emergency surgery–with operations of memory or cognition? How exactly do we live an event in our imaginations?

I imagine asking questions. I make gestures. My forearm turns, my palm facing up, my fingers spread as if holding a ball. The word, the body of the question is turned around, as if it had a behind. Is there revealed in this gesture an appresentation of the question, a behind of the question that would intimate, following Kojima after a fashion, the coexistence of another intention within the intentionality of the question? (We incidentally see why it so important to make a study of composition; the composition of the questioner is to be questioned.) Kojima's analysis, however, would place the appresentation of the question, if such indeed occurs, prior to any movement of the body. That is not my claim here. In fact, if we could easily separate movements of the body from acts of consciousness we should be able to easily pose the imaginary question.

If we live questions, images or events of consciousness, insofar as such exist, in the moment, how then do we sustain an inquiry? Surely it is not completely nonsensical to say that we can sustain an inquiry. Perhaps we shouldn't take the moment for granted, as if it already existed as some measurable unit of time ready to fit to acts of consciousness–we don't yet know how to clearly demarcate acts from activities, particular questions from sustained inquiries. "Sustained inquiry" answers in part how a question arises, though of course it can only address part of the question of the manner of the question's arising, and is only the rudest beginning of an account of the cultivation of a questioning disposition. Do we need to assume that the moment is destroyed with the advent of a new question, or could moments possibly be expandable or repeatable in a way that would still allow them to be moments, to define the temporal boundedness of a conscious engagement?

Is the imaginary question spontaneous? Do we see it emerge from an engagement with the world or does it completely take us by surprise? These alternatives may not in fact be mutually exclusive but it may be helpful to begin to think of spontaneity by viewing it as a complete and instantaneous surprise, so as to appreciate spontaneity for itself, and then to wonder about its history of engagement with the world. Casey draws a distinction between controlled imagining and spontaneous imagining, and says that an image can either be exclusively controlled or spontaneous. Yet what is spontaneity? Casey says that "a truly spontaneous phenomenon initiates itself rather than being initiated by other phenomena: it is autogenous" (Imagining, p. 68). I wonder though about a possible heterogeneity of the imaginary question, perhaps involving a heterogeneity of the imaginary questioner. And still I wonder whether a spontaneous image must be imagined to be real. In what manner is "to be imagined" an engagement with the world?

Perhaps it is movement itself that imagines, to wrest an idea from Barbaras. It occurred to me (out walking the other day) that only a being who could move could imagine spontaneity, and, extending the idea with a twist back on itself, only a being who could imagine itself stepping free of causality could enact causality. On reflection, though, perhaps it is not a being nor even a hermeneutic extentiality but actually a living movement who imagines spontaneity, an existential hermeneutic living movement–a questioner? An existence capable of grasping the appresented, of turning the question around, making it a question? Who would be capable of the impossible, of asking the imaginary question–but is the impossibility of the imaginary question an established fact? We can imagine that it can be posed, and we can begin to imagine how it can be posed, by an existence who could so to speak keep itself hidden from itself for the duration of the posing of a question, who could realize and irrealize at once, as just one possible avenue. How do we imagine posing questions at all? Do we want to say that that's impossible? I can imagine posing an empty question, a question without content. The gesture is here. How close am I then to posing an imaginary question? I always seem to be at the limit of the imaginary question itself. Could I be held back by a belief in the question itself, the question as such? Is it possible that someday, in a moment when the question itself slips my mind, the imaginary question will emerge spontaneously? How can I be sure that this isn't possible? Why would I assume that the things I can learn about my imagination, my questioning or my consciousness at the present moment will always obtain, that a possible other consciousness cannot ever be real? What is the meaning of an other consciousness? Certainly not simply what I imagine it to be, what I put in there–but what about a spontaneous imagination, the other imagination? Must that be imagined? Must spontaneity be embodied, and wouldn't that then be a kind of other consciousness that would be second in importance to a singular other to whom we have an ethical responsibility and whose otherness must not be conflated with the imaginary otherness of a spontaneity?

I didn't quite intend to end up here brushing up against ethics in pursuit of the imaginary question. However, let me add a thought. Why do we ask questions? Do we ask questions merely to feed our own curiosities, or might we be practicing a style of engagement with others, a way of turning a problem around to let curiosities be generated from multiple facets of a fascination–okay, there's a danger of going in circles here; we are still thinking about feeding a curiosity, by way of a fascination, which would have some relation to movement by being other than a movement though it might be generated by a living movement, but we are adding to curiosity the idea of other facets. Does the other facet arrest movement? Does it transfix? Does it transfigure? (And with transfiguration we are back to thinking of spontaneity as an other figure, another animal form (we may have twisted ourselves around: only an ethical being could imagine spontaneity, only a being who could respond to others could see itself as ex-isting outside of causality). How do we conceptualize the transfixation on the facet of the question? Does the fascination of the question only have this facet, this turning of a face, and never touch on a question itself, which would kill all curiosity once and for all, and might a fascination's impossible existence only in facets be a reason for the difficulty in conceiving the real possibility of an imaginary question? No, but there would still be the turning of the facets in place of the "itself," and that would have to be an itself of sorts, or at the minimum it would qualify as real–or would it? Can we both irrealize and realize the turning of a facet for (another) consciousness? Can we or can we not ask an imaginary question?

Labels: Barbaras, body, Casey, imagination, Kojima, questions, spontaneity

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:10 AM. 13 comments

The first skoppic principle (relational architecture) is the breach. As we have seen, the skoppic function transposes a breach of skipping around from the axle tree of the synkairotic to the axle tree of the syntagmatic (syntactic yada yada syntactile yada yada syntacit yada yada }∅{). The }∅{ heralds the Fa Passage between atonicities, the pure diatessarial leap, delfYan sunflower in the myrrour of myrrours, the plagiodelphic breach again }∅{ again. "A monad is the semblance of a world," Massumi says, to which a proper reply might be "}∅{." }∅{ stands for a representation of the breach (transposed into the diatessarial, the mode of its standing for). It is of course the empty set that excludes no members; remember, this is all about shape.

The sheer volume of what is excluded from the breach compels us to imagine a reality without any breaches, as we might imagine Reality without the Unicorn, or more multiversally as we might imagine a reality without a selected molecule of H₂O. Well, the ways of irreality are limitless. I won't pretend otherwise. As I picture it, a world without breaches would be a quiet world, a world without spasms, without startles of any note. The reality that pertains to the breach, insofar the breach is pertained—actually it's eminently, if paradoxically, pertained by its own }{—is a spasmoreality. A spasmoreality contains an irreality in a special sense of holding with; it holds with irreality by holding an opening for irreality. Here we are talking about the myrrour of the spasmoreality; spasmorealities as they are lived hold a multitude of openings for irrealities. We should have a precise understanding of reality at this juncture. Reality is the sense of a world's duration (with this necessary proviso: we have no reason to believe that continuity covers all the possibilities of duration). The spasmomonde is the world whose sense of duration is characterized by the startle, or by startles. Picture a world without starts, a dead world. This is the kind of world bracketed out by the breach (and its representations); well this is a paradox (which won't be discussed away) not the least of which because the dead world also pertains to the breach by the same logic that anything pertains the breach, and hence as the spasmoreal and its worlds pertain to the breach. I won't say the spasmoreal and the thanatoreal pertain equally to the breach. How could I know such a thing? A thanatomonde may also describe a world without causality. Ideally, causality should be able to be startled. The reality pertaining to which causalities may be startled must by definition be a spasmoreality. We mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the spasmoreal opposes the thanatoreal or contains it in any sense other than the sense of holding an opening for it. If we could read backward from the diatessarial (and everything that relates to, everything it elapses) into the synkairotic we would see that the breach holds an opening for itself—its opportunism does not stop at itself, but only startles, which is how it carries half the synkairotic into the breach, as a startle. It's not as if the breach had a reality and its reality were spasmoreality; spasmoreality merely pertains. One might object that thanatoreality also pertains to the breach. What is special about spasmoreality's pertaining to the breach, or to a reality of startled causation? Thanataoreality pertains only through the breach. It has not other avenue of pertinence. Spasmoreality we can't be sure of. It pertains to the breach, and through the breach, but whether it follows other avenues of pertinence is not yet clear. It may be something of a flâneur. How does it pertain? If the reality of startled causation is also a spasmoreality, there is then a sense in which spasmoreality appears to pertain by doubling, which may be autoreplication, or some more familiar form of reproduction. Familiar words spring to mind, but we should be wary of thinking they describe the spasmoreal: viral, virtual, simulacra. Spasmoreality is not genuinely familiar. Probably it doubles itself by a process of meontic renewal, having one flipper periodically/at all times in irreality. However, we would never become aware of inhabiting a thanatomonde did it not pertain to the breach (as well as through the breach). An equality of pertinence can never be excluded from possibility, that is, from spasmoreal possibility most broadly conceived; more narrow ideas of possibility may bypass such an equality altogether. We must be able to imagine that a possibility may be seen merely in its thanatic aspect, or through its thanatognomic signs, even though they will appear to us as dead only by way of the breach, which, in a sense, holds thanatoreality up to its myrrour. The challenge, in the breach, is to discern living relation from revivifying dead relation, or, in an objective mode, the startle from the twitter of a dry nerve. Intuitively this is known by explorers of the spasmomonde and its doubles, which is why the rampike becomes a potent symbol, as delfYan zombies haunt the passageways.

"Kojima is on to something." The words recur. It would be eight kinds of wrong to believe that shape belongs exclusively to the sharing of opportune moment and all that signifies. Shape pertains to the passage between the synkairotic and the }∅{—and so we begin to imagine that the breach doesn't contain everything, that its reality isn't the spasmoreality of all spasmorealities, or any manner of real synthesis of all that lives and dies. There is this business of the from/to structure of experience, or movement of experience, that we can use to characterize the breach. Does it belong to the breach? Is from/to autospastic? Why study the gift? I reckon we shouldn't want to mystify, though there may be depths to plumb, nuances to unwrap, gestures to perfect. The gift requests a certain latitudinarianism. If the breach comes with a from/to, does it wipe the from/to away? Does it send it back?

Shape is given with the movement from the synkairotic to the }∅{; shape is given with the world. We remain totally within the realm of phenomenality, perhaps a lived phenomenality. (There are many sad clowns in the realm of phenomenality; oh well.) I've been saying "spasmomonde" as if its world could be defined by a certain sense of its duration, while it remains possible that a nonsense relation obtains between a world and its duration. If a spasmomonde were characterized by a nonsense of duration, its reality would have to be something other than spasmoreality properly conceived. I'm not persuaded that most spasmorealities aren't in fact improper, and in that sense the myrrour of spasmoreality may well be improper. As I see it a nonsense of duration is thanatognomic (which is why I would caution against allowing virtuality and its cousins to be thought yet). Spasmoreality holds an opening for irreality, and by the same gesture it holds an opening for thanatoreality, though it does not contain thanatoreality in any but this highly special sense, and if we find better ways of talking about continence and pertinence we should jump ship. This holding of openings is what allows shape to be presented, or to present itself, if that's what it does. In any case shape is never given by itself, but always with the world, and never in a vacuum, or what amounts to the same thing, in a dead living space, a space of dead things and furnitures, but always in the passage from the synkairotic to the }∅{, or, as may equally be the case according to the logos of the skop, the passage from }∅{ to the synkairotic, which may indeed be the originary passage, if the breach has an originary—of course we have our doubts.

Could there be a given world given with no shapes, not one measly shape? This is like asking whether there can be a world of no duration. The difference between not having any duration and not being able to make sense of a duration is inconceivably close to pure difference. Is from/to a shape? Is the breach? Always we are able to look at things sideways. Shape however is not what it appears to be seen only from a profile or an aspect; shape always has in its appearance a from-the-inside which makes it shape. We want to know shape in, or better, through the breach. Shape startles. Only a spasmoreality could hold an opening for that which is mondial by neither excluding nor containing worlds, that is, by the breach. Such is shape.

Labels: dolphins, kairos, Kojima, Massumi, monadology, nonsense, shape, spasmoreality, Thales

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:41 AM. 0 comments

News of a journal called infleXions comes by way of Esmail's blog. Brian Massumi's contribution invites us to think again about the behind of things. Here's a sample:

[T]o see an object is to see volume. We don’t infer volume. We see the voluminousness of an object, directly and immediately, without having to think about it. We don’t say to ourselves: “let’s see, there’s a surface facing me, I would wager that there is a backside to it, which means it’s a 3D object, and therefore I could walk around it and see and touch the other side.” We don’t say this to ourselves because we don’t say anything to ourselves. We just see. We see what’s before us directly and immediately as an object. We see the “backedness” of it without actually seeing around to the other side. That’s precisely what makes it a perception of an object, rather than a deduction about a surface. We are really but implicitly – abstractly – seeing the object’s voluminousness. The perceived shape of an object is this abstract experience of volume. Part of it, anyway, because we also directly and immediately see an object’s weightiness. For example, We see weightiness through texture. Voluminousness and weightiness are not in themselves visible. But we can’t not see them when we see an object. In fact, we see them in the form of the object. Form is full of all sorts of things that it actually isn’t -- and that actually aren’t visible. Basically, it’s full of potential. When we see an object’s shape we are not seeing around to the other side, but what we are seeing, in a real way, is our capacity to see the other side. We’re seeing, in the form of the object, the potential our body holds to walk around, take another look, extend a hand and touch. The form of the object is the way a whole set of active, embodied, potentials appear in present experience: how vision can relay into kinesthesia or the sense of movement, and how kinesthesia can relay into touch. The potential we see in the object is a way our body has of being able to relate to the part of the world it happens to find itself in at this particular life’s moment. What we abstractly see when we directly and immediately see an object is lived relation – a life dynamic. Once again, we don’t see it instead of what we think of as being the actual form of the object. We’re seeing double again. But this time, we’re seeing the actual form “with and through” that set of abstract potentials. The reason we’re directly seeing an object and not just a surface is because we can’t not see what we’re seeing without also experiencing voluminousness and weightiness – the object’s invisible qualities. Seeing an object is seeing through to its qualities. That’s the doubleness: if you’re not qualitatively seeing what isn’t actually visible, you’re not seeing an object, you’re not seeing objectively.

(Massumi's emphases)

So, recalling Kojima's position on the matter, we now have two alternative ways, which may not be mutually exclusive, of understanding how we know, insofar as we can we say that we do know any such thing, that things have behind: (1) we know things have behinds because we live in an intersubjective world; (2) we know things have behinds because we live in a virtual world. There's a path that would dispense with the world altogether: behinds are given because we live intersubjectively or because we live virtually. However, I want to take some weight off the living entity and see if the world can carry it. Here are two alternatives: form is given with the world; shape is given with the world—I'll pick this up later.

Labels: Kojima, Massumi, possibility, shape, virtuality

posted by Fido the Yak at 5:09 PM. 2 comments

Jacky had pointed out the following passage from Agamben's Infacny and History:

Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of the imagination. For Antiquity, the imagination, which is now expunged from knowledge as 'unreal', was the supreme medium of knowledge. As the intermediary between the senses and the intellect, enabling, in phantasy, the union between the sensible form and the potential intellect, it occupies in ancient and medieval culture exactly the same role that our culture assigns to experience. Far from being something unreal, the mundus imaginabilis has its full reality between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intellegibilis, and is, indeed, the condition of their communication–that is to say, of knowledge. And since according to Antiquity, it is the imagination which forms dream images, this explains the particular relationship to truth which dreams have in the ancient world (like divination per somnia) and to efficacious knowledge (like medical treatment per incubationem). . . . Within the formula with which medieval Aristotelianism defines this mediating function of the imagination ('nihil potest homo intelligere sine phantasmate' [the human being can know nothing without imagination]), the homology between phantasy and experience is still perfectly clear. But with Descartes and the birth of modern science, the function of fantasy is assumed by the new subject of knowledge: the ego cogito (observe that in the technical vocabulary of medieval philosophy, cogitare referred rather to the discourse of the imagination than to the act of intelligence). Between the new ego and the corporeal world, between res cogitans and res extensa, there is no need for any mediation. The resulting expropriation of the imagination is made evident in the new way of characterizing its nature: while in the past it was not a 'subjective' thing, but was rather the coincidence of subjective and objective, of internal and external, of the sensible and the intelligible, now it is its combinatory and hallunicinatory character, to which Antiquity gave secondary importance, that is given primacy. From having been the subject of experience the phantasm become the subject of mental alienation, visions and magical phenomena–in other words, everything that is excluded by real experience.

(pp. 24-25)

Agamben's aside about cogitare reminds me of Hiroshi Kojima (Monad and Thou) putting the old college twist on the cogito, which had rekindled my interest in thinking about the imagination. Some of the reading I've been doing has focused on the image or imagery. Imagery, however, seems rather to be choreographed by a faculty of imagination, a power of imagining something as something. This power seems intimate and strange to me at turns, like the power of the muses. The footprints of the muses are ubiquitous over the fields of the imaginary, and of course on the pathways of the oneiric. Anyway, this passage of Agamben's has resonated with me, and I reckon I will retain an impression of its sounding as I plunge deeper into a study of the imagination.

Labels: Agamben, cogito, imagination, Kojima, Passages

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:13 AM. 0 comments

Kojima's critical Buberism (Monad and Thou, Section IV) fails to consider an obvious counterpoint. If I am unable to encounter you immediately in your entirety, as Kojima maintains, it isn't because there must be some structure or mechanism of mediation between us; rather, the problem lies with believing that entirety has anything to do with you or me. If you are not given in your entirety because entirety doesn't pertain to you, then neither are you given partially. The idea of partial givenness, by which Buber characterizes relations to the third person, cannot characterize your giveness in any mode if you are not a whole that can be parceled out. This is a slightly different question than whether you can be given indirectly.

Are you given to me–or is it us to whom you are given–in adumbrations? There is a problem here in the tendency to think that there must be a you yourself behind your givenness. We don't need to make that leap. We can say instead that you are your adumbrating, and we can recognize your being your adumbrating because your givenness is structured according to a horizon. You are in fact given to me in a unique horizon of our encounter, in which we acts as a so to speak invisible dimension. A strict Buberism would dismiss this approach as thinking my relation to you as being of the same kind as my relation to things that appear. I don't think this is quite true, because our horizon makes all the difference.

Now Kojima and I both agree, I think, that you don't become it, and it doesn't become you. Buber's formula, "'It' is a pupa, Thou is a butterfly," is a little off. You become you, just as I become me, we become us, he becomes him and so on. When I considered Deleuze's metaphor of the larval subject, I suggested marking a difference between endless becoming and perpetual becoming. I'm not sure I would stand by that, but if I do for the sake of argument, then it might follow that you are given to me in one of your many becomings, and once again there might be a temptation to think of "one of many" as partial. I'm not sure of that. Do you ever actually become a butterfly? Perhaps the metaphor is a little misplaced, because it implies that the butterfly is the realization of a becoming, a being that no longer becomes. You don't need to be realized because you are already real. You are always already a butterfly. You are a thousand butterflies. You are given to me as precisely as many butterflies as it takes to make our world.

Labels: Barbaras, butterflies, Deleuze, givenness, Kojima, you

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:04 AM. 0 comments

"Genuine ontology," says Hiroshi Kojima, "stands on the ground of praxis and the contradiction of life" (Monad and Thou, p. 168). The first part of this statement is easiest to think, though Kojima complicates his ontology by introducing an ontological difference between the being of the world and the being of things, the latter of which is included in the former. It is a resolutely anthropological ontology, applying only to a lifeform that uses tools–in Kojima's opinion only humans use tools (p. 161). He explains the difference between the two beings as the difference between a teleological life force in the case of the being of the world, and causal being in the case of the being of things. Acknowledging the contribution of Maine de Biran, while disagreeing with the characterization of life force as hyperorganic, Kojima describes the relation between the two kinds of being in terms of resistence (p. 163). He compares the being of objects in general to the il y a:

The Being (il y a) of Emmanuel Levinas, a Being that is distinguished from any concrete being, is very close to our sense of the Being in general of things. It is anonymous and impersonal. It is regarded as the object of the never-sleeping "insomniac" consciousness. It is impossible for this Being to die, perhaps because it is already dead. It signifies a Being that is intolerably and violently objectified in space by the primal transcendental subjectivity, which is originally impersonal and anonymous and is beyond any particular ego.

(p. 162)

He also draws a comparison with Sartre's "practico-inert," though Kojima sees this phenomenon clearly in terms of a struggle of life.

If the being of things is anonymous, so too is there an anonymous quality to the being of the world. Kojima says that "a Being that an epistemological consciousness never expects springs out from the depths of the world in the practical dimension, a prerational teleological force of life, so-to-speak, and consciousness can only control the outcome of this power. Consciousness does not know what this power is and where it comes from. Indeed, it is my power on the one hand, but on the other it is a Being that is completely other than mine" (p. 160, Kojima's emphais). Again, he says, "the power of life is not always mine, and the telos of life is not always I myself. In a sense, indeed, life belongs to me and is entrusted to me, but I nevertheless do know what life is and where it comes from. I also don't know when it will depart from me. In this sense, life is precisely other than mine and has a telos beyond me. The power of life must thus be regarded as something contradictory: as mine and other than mine at the same time" (p. 165, Kojima's emphasis). Kojima will seek the telos of life in the Thou (p. 166).

Without committing to Kojima's analysis of the telos of life, I'd like to take a second to think about the contradiction he sees in life. He contrasts his view with Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, because whereas Nietzsche sees a power that wills to be itself, Kojima sees a force in contradiction to its identity (pp. 165-166).. (Whether this is a fair reading of Nietzsche I leave for others to determine; Kojima's idea interests me in itself.) Kojima says that his "ring of eternal return would everywhere be cut by the inner contradiction of life" (p. 166). If I acknowledge my own life force as being in one sense other than mine, how then should I live? Does the question even pertain to me any longer once I have recognized this contradiction inherent in my life? It feels like a terrible blow to my freedom, like the best I can hope for is to enjoy life in a thousand petty acts of resistence. There is of course the option of suicide, but I hardly think that is the best response to a curtailment of freedom. Is it so painful just to be alive?

Whenever I encounter an idea of alienation I have to wonder whether it is a manifestation of modern bourgeois life. Surely modern bourgeois life accentuates feelings of personal alienation–but why should I be a part of it? Why should I lend my own style to the accentuation of personal alienation? On the one hand I have the way I live, which is not uncomfortable from day to day. I read philosophy at my leisure. On the other hand, I have questions about how I should live. Do these questions too spring from my leisure? Or is it only the style of questioning, the accentuation of this or that, that provides a testament to my social situation? If the telos of "my" life is other than mine, I can't help but think that it's proper owner might be a demonic force more horrible than Thou, a demonic force with many frightening names. And yet I address myself to you as if you weren't so horrible after all. Hmm.

Labels: Kojima, life, ontology

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:01 AM. 2 comments

As we've seen, László Tengelyi favors Sinnbildung over Sinngebung, and Erfahrung over Erlebnis. His discussion of an experiential sense in The Wild Region of Life-History touches on a few more ideas I'd like to consider. The first of these is a broadened concept of sense.

Tengelyi draws a distinction between linguistic meaning and extralinguistic sense, and he claims that "all lived experience is related to the spontaneous emergence of a dispossessed sense, whereas the conceptual and linguistic expression of this sense is necessarily based on a retroactive fixation of sense" (p. 3). This is a little confusing, because Erlebnis is often rendered into English as "lived experience," yet Tegnelyi seems to want to talk about Erfahrung. He regards Erlebnis as the product of a static analysis, whereas Erfahrung refers to "the emergence of a new insight" (pp. 18-19). The conclusion I draw is that Tengelyi also means to investigate Erfahrung as it is lived. He departs from Husserl by intending to provide a phenomenology of experience that includes what takes place "behind the back of consciousness," which Tengelyi equates with the interintentional and the spontaneous.

Tengelyi makes a keen observation about intentionality. He says that it has the structure of "the consciousness of something as something" (p. 13, Tengelyi's emphasis). He notes that the German Etwas als Etwas ("something as something") is often translated into French, for instance by Levinas, as ceci en tant que cela ("this as that"), pointing to the concept of difference that is inherent in the idea (p. 5). One could easily become entangled in conceptual paradoxes of the indentical and the different, of sameness and alterity. Tengelyi sees this as a deceptive shortcut to grasping experiential sense. The task for phenomenology, which he regards as true for Hegel as well as for Husserl, is not to conceive experience dialectically, but to conceive dialectics in terms of experience (p. 6).

Taking a cue from Gadamer, Tengelyi imagines experience in its poignancy.

[E]xperience always touches a sore point; it cuts to the quick, it strikes home; it has, in other words, its characteristic poignancy. That is why experience, in its original form–as the experience one gains–is one's own lived experience, which belongs to one's own life-history and is properly expressed in the first-person singular.

(p. 7, Tengelyi's emphases)

I want to clarify a distinction Tengelyi makes between primary and secondary notions of experience before offering a criticism. According to Tengelyi, shared experience is a secondary notion of experience, a dispositional and sedimented kind of experience, whereas experience in its primary sense of an event of poignancy is always singular. I'm unhappy with this distinction. There are examples of shared experience that are not in the third-person, but the first-person plural. Erotic experiences would be the example par excellence (though of course there are phenomena of autoeroticism). If you've read this far, I assume we are sharing some kind of experience, an experience that goes beyond my solitary act of writing and enters into conversation. There is a possibility of discovering poignancies together, of furthering a discussion into poignancies that are not mine alone. My commentary may surprise you, and it may surprise me as well; I expect the same is true of your commentary, should you choose to offer any. If the event of poignancy is a sense without signs, it by no means follows that we can't experience a poignancy together. Even silences, heavy with poignancy, may be shared. The move from Sinngebung to Sinnbildung suggests this possibility, yet in emphasizing the spontanteous generation of sense, Tengelyi seems to foreclose on the reality of the plural interior of experience. We are exposed to the bite of the world, capable of sharing events of poignancy, a fact I am sure of because of the way I experience my body. Is empathy spontaneously generated? Is that the word?

Now I have to clarify what Tengelyi means by "interintentional," because his meaning is not the same as Kojima's interintentionality. For Kojima, interintentionality points to an orginal plurality of the transcendental consciousness. For Tengelyi, on the other hand, interintentionality refers to "shreds of sense on a path running from one intentional experience to another. We may describe these shreds as interintentional moments of a spontaneous sense formation, adding that the phenomenon of 'interintentionality' gives its precise meaning to the expression 'behind the back of consciousness'" (p. 19, Tengelyi's emphasis). Now, there is a sense in which Kojima's interintentionality also occurs, so to speak, behind the back of consciousness. Which of these approaches offers more insight into the everyday experience of empathy? We'll see how Tengelyi deals with these problems when he turns his attention to the experience and ethics of alterity.

Labels: experience, Kojima, Tengelyi

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:55 AM. 0 comments

Ludwig Feuerbach proclaims, "I am a real, sensuous being. My body belongs to my being; indeed, my body in its entirety is my ego, my being itself" (Ich bin ein wirkliches, ein sinnliches Wesen: der Leib gehört zu meinem Wesen; ja der Leib in siener Totalität ist mein Ich, mein Wesen selber, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, § 37 (§ 36 in Hanfi's translation)). Hiroshi Kojima credits Feuerbach's thesis for laying the ground for three philosophical movements: Marxism, vitalism, and existentialism (Monad and Thou, p. 127). I won't fully recapitulate Kojima's review of Occidental thinking about the body. Instead I will touch on those points that give texture to his idea of the somatic ego.

When Feuerbach says that "The human being thinks, not the ego, not reason" (Der Mensch denkt, nicht das Ich, nicht die Vernunft, § 51 (§50 in Hanfi's translation)), Kojima takes this to mean that not only is Feuerbach rejecting the equation of the ego with reason, but also the proposition that the somatic ego thinks solipistically, "because who thinks as a human being is the specific cosubject 'I and Thou' in Feuerbach's sense" (Monad and Thou, p. 128). This appears to be a contradiction because for Kojima the somatic ego is the agent of transcendental reflection, which might reasonably be understood to mean that the somatic ego thinks. However, Kojima says, interpreting Feuerbach, that the "subject of rational thinking would not be a single somatic ego but rather the cosubject 'I-Thou,' which is a specific dialogical relationship and can never be deduced from any social relations of plural somatic egos" (p. 129). Is his somatic ego sufficiently different from what Feuerbach meant by "ego" that we should give him a pass? Or does he mean not to accept the meaning he has given to "the human being thinks"? What is the sense of the somatic Kojima is working with, and how will he overcome the charge of solipsism?

Kojima's interprets Henri Bergson's thinking about the body (in Matter and Memory) in phenomenological terms. He examines Bergson's distinction between imaginative memory and repetitive memory, with respect to their temporal and spatial aspects. "[R]epetitive memory as kinesthetic structure," he summarizes, "constitutes the tip where all consciousness (which for Bergson means all imaginative memory) contacts the body (especially the brain) as the central image and penetrates it from the past" (p. 132). In Kojima's reading, Bergson leaves no room for the generation of imaginative memory, and he would need a concept of a consciousness acting passively in the present to grasp perceptive presentation (which for Kojima takes place not in the material world, but the phenomenal). There is thus no conscious stream moving from the present to the past. He suggests a "return of imaginative memory to perspectival horizontal intentionality and of repetitive memory to the vertical temporal intentionality," and says this will mean "that the spatiality of the body is not only a present section of life-time, but also a historical embodiment of life into a definite form through the intersubjective coupling (Paarung) of vertical intentionalities" (p. 133).

For Kojima, the somatic ego is a double subjectivity, but its doubleness does not exactly correspond to the two intentionalities, horizontal and vertical. He examines Max Scheler's idea of a body-feeling, and sees a dialectical synthesis that takes the form of a body-surface-consciousness.

The body-surface-consciousness, which spreads all over the surface of my body as the clothing of my life, looks around the world through the whole surface of my body (including the back or the tips of the toes) as a horizon-intentionality, and looks at the object "by becoming the thing" (Nishida), grasping the whole surface of a thing with the corresponding whole surface of my body as an object-intentionality. In other words, my perceptive consciousness looks at the world or objects only through and in accordance with my physical body, which my life wears as its nonpositional clothing. In addition, the same surface-consciousness, as incarnated by life (Leib), gives an ambiguous character to all the kinesthetic sensations of my body, which are extensive and external to each other, though not posited in space and time, as Max Scheler has shown. This consciousness can also be aptly called "the kinesthetic body-apperception."

In this way, when we are freed from the prejudice of life philosophy, there emerges before us at last the figure of a somatic ego that consists of double subjectivity: a perceptive body-surface-consciousness and a self-projective imaginative Will to live.

(pp. 136-137)

This recognition of a double subjectivity of the somatic ego leads Kojima to an interesting critique of existentialism.

In contrast to life philosophy, which grasps the ego simply as a vital phenomenon as a result of its inclination toward the dimension of life, existential philosophy clearly anticipates the irreducibly double structure of the body. Unfortunately, however, it divides this duality into two independent moments and allots each of them two different ways of human life. We already find in Kierkegaard's scheme of the "mass" and "the single" (der Einzelne) the predecessor of this division, but in Heidegger's dichotomy of "authentic" and "inauthentic," or of "anticipatory resoluteness" and "das Man" we find its epitome. Here two subjectivities that orginally belong to a single body appear as centers of two separate incompatible areas.

(p. 137)

At this point I will stop and question what Kojima has accomplished so far, and what use can be made of his concept of a somatic ego. In his insistence on the egological dimension of the body, Kojima is out of step with recent European philosophy. He is, nevertheless, an original thinker. He brings a sophisitication to the problem of embodiment that, if not as elegant, is similar to Merleau-Ponty's, whom Kojima says he is closest to philosophically. He doesn't consider the work of Michel Henry, Jan Patočka or Renaud Barbaras, phenomenologists who have each made a contribution to the problem of embodiment. On the other hand, he does consider Japanese philosophers who are often ignored in European phenomenological works. Yet for all his sophistication, his philosophy still feels a little uncomfortable. I can say "I am a real, sensuous being" much more easily than I can say "I am a somatic ego" or "I am a monad." At some point I reckon I will come to terms with my ego, or what it means to be me, and then I will be in a better position to evaluate what Kojima is offering. At the moment, my sense of the somatic ego is a little up in the air.

Labels: body, egology, Feuerbach, Kojima

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:18 AM. 2 comments

Is empathy grounded in the play of signs? I'm putting the question to Jesper Hoffmeyer even though others (Donald Favareau, for instance) have already expanded on his work and reformulated the problem. Hoffmeyer remains, however, an exemplar of the semiotic point of view on empathy. He sees empathy as a therapeutic response to a uniquely human existential terror stemming from the thought that one could be replaced, a thought that creates a split between an emotionally whole self and an emotionally neutral player who is free to contemplate his or her mortality (Signs of Meaning in the Universe, p. 132). He says:

The interchangability of the players implies an emotional and cognitive relationship between them. Human beings could never have learned to put themselves in someone else's psychological place if they had not already learned to see themselves reflected in that other person, to see the other person as a creature just like them.

The terror and the empathy go hand in hand and language is their medium. In actual fact it was not humanity, much less erectus, who engendered them. It was a little child. Lacan's reflection theory holds the key: the mutual empathy between mother and child provided the protection necessary to cope with the unleashing of the awful isolation inherent in the idea of "not."

(pp. 132-133)

Phenomena like atruism in chimpanzees suggest that either chimpanzees are more intellectually capable than Hoffmeyer gives them credit for (calling into question the uniqueness of the existential terror of imagining oneself as interchangable), even though they lack language. Such phenomena might also call into question the notion that empathy emerges as response to a kind of cognition. We needn't turn to the behavioural studies of primates however in order to philosophically question this premise. Kojima, for instance, talks about the ontic meaning of the other being present to us immanently prior to any perspective that would allow for an exchange of viewpoints, and he speaks of an ontological anticipation of alterity that precedes any introjection of one's own being into other bodies. Favareau might tell us that such ontological anticipations are also a kind of neurological interpretation (and therefore also "cognitive"), but I wonder if instead we might question the semiotic nature of empathy.

If empathy is semiotic in anything like a Peircean sense, it would seem to involve multiple interpretants. The stubbed toe affects its owner and any empathetic witnesses at once. I can't say whether Peirce ever provided a satisfactory account of empathy or compassion, but the very idea of com-passion challenges my understanding of the idea that sign relations are purely triadic. Sign relations in empathy appear to be tetrahedral, at the least. I see meaning in the relationship between interpretants, but I don't know what semiotic model would be capable of exploring it.

I've quoted Jean-Luc Nancy before as saying:

Meaning is the exhibition of the foundation without foundation, which is not an abyss but simply the with of things that are, insofar as they are. Logos is dialogue, but the end of dialogue is not to overcome itself in "consensus"; its reason is to offer, and only to offer (giving it tone and intensity), the cum-, the with of meaning, the plurality of its springing forth.

(Being Singular Plural, pp. 86-87).

Now I want to ask whether meaning is always meaning towards something, or more simply meaning something. (A secondary question concerns whether meaning is always for somebody–I'll leave that aside for the moment.) Is meaning towards a thing qualitatively the same as meaning towards another person? Nancy invites us to roam in a region of meaning between singularities. Can this meaning of the with also be thought of as a meaning towards, or would that necessarily imply a kind of foundation that Nancy rejects? I'm not sure.

All told the semiotic depiction of empathy feels a little cold to me. Perhaps there are senses in which empathy is grounded in the play of signs, but I'm having a hard time envisaging a semiotic approach that doesn't obliterate the meaning of the other or, alternatively, the meaning of being with others. What sense of meaning, if any, does the phenomenon of empathy call for?

Labels: chimpanzees, compassion, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kojima, meaning, Nancy, Peirce, uniqueness

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:32 AM. 0 comments

"The Monads have no windows," says Leibniz. Kojima's monadology offers an alternative view of the monad, yet it is not so easy to disect his argument. He says, "Transcendental consciousness cannot enter and be confined in my monad without windows, contrary to the traditional opinion of Leibniz and Husserl, insofar as transcendental consciousness is essentially intersubjective (or intentionally associative) and open to the other" (Monad and Thou, p. 115). However, Kojima does not conclude that because transcendental consciousness is intersubjective therefore the monad must have windows. Rather, he argues that "in order to perform the ownness [Eigenheit] reduction and realize the enclosed monad, it is necessary not only to exclude the entire intentionality of the other ego and the other ego as transcendence, but also to constitute the 'world with unseen sides' through suspending my own transcendental consciousness itself" (ibidem, my emphasis). That is, he argues that the agent of the ownness reduction is not the transcendental consciousness but "the pregiven Leib [lived body] with its own consciousness" (ibidem). Transcendental consciousness has the ability to constitute the body as object (Körper), but never the body as it is lived. Yet if the lived body is able to discover that it belongs to somebody exclusively, it still is not clear to me in what sense we can talk about the lived body as being enclosed, or as being essentially windowless. Before jumping to the argument that life is essentially open, I'd like to take a closer look at what Kojima is saying to clarify the scope of our disagreement, if there is in fact one.

Of course, in the natural world the intentionality of the other is made anonymous in many cases, and it is even less likely to appear as pure immanence in the monad like the body of the other did. However, as a matter of fact, in order to make the intentionality of the other emerge in its proper mode, precisely the ownness reduction to my primordial sphere is indispensible. Then the monad is completely closed to the intentionality of the other except in its ontic meaning, insofar as, and only insofar as, the monad is the pregiven world centered on the Leib (and not on the Leib-Körper). Against this closedness of the monad the intentionality of the other appears, not simply as intentionally transcendent meaning, but rather as something breaking through its closedness, or as the penetration from transcendence into immanence. This is the phenomenon called the "look." The look is the emergence of the intentionality of the other itself by way of its meaning, as it is recognized most evidently in the case of penetration into my monad.

(p. 112, my emphasis)

It seems that here Kojima is saying that the monad has windows onto the ontic meaning of the other, though it cannot be interpreted except by passing through an ownness reduction that does not take place in the transcendental sphere. (This is Kojima's main disagreement with Husserl, who holds that the ownness appears in a transcendental sphere; see Cartesian Meditations, § 44.) So I note here one exception to the enclosure of the monad. There is, I think, another.

Now the transcendental other emerges as the "look" to my deepened monad as the genuine primordial sphere; it breaks through the completeness of my monad from the outside. Immediately corresponding to it, my transcendental consciousness breaks through the wall of the monad from the inside, mediated by my somatic ego, which has been dormant in the monad, holding the ontic meaning of the other, and posits the Körper of myself and others upon the There in cooperation with the invading transcendental others in order to establish the common objective world. At this point everything is objectified in the open horizon and even my monad disappears and appears only appresentively as mood.

(p. 116)

Kojima says in a footnote, "Mood is the monad appresented through objective space. Therefore it always contains the nuance that expresses one's accessibility to one's own concealed monad" (p. 236, No. 22). I find this very suggestive. Is it possible that the monad not only has windows onto the ontic meaning of others, but also a door (mood), a way of stepping in and out of the monad?

The following passage shows what Kojima sees as being at stake in a reduction to a primordial ownmost sphere of the monad:

[T]ranscendental intersubjectivity (with its sole objective world) and monadic individuality are not completely mediated by the Leib-Körper ego. Rather, these two strata embrace and influence the somatic ego from the top and bottom respectively, so to speak, in an immanent-transcendent way. Thus the life-world is not the simple field of the incarnation or the self-realization of transcendental reason, as Husserl thought. No light of reason could illuminate the very depths of monadic individuality. The dark foundation that supports the life-world from the bottom allows no simple rationalization. The life-world, or the somatic ego inhabiting it, is nothing other than the "contact point" of rationality and irrationality, as well as the "field of struggle" of both.

(p. 118)

In this passage it seems that there is a windowless quality to the monad since no "light of reason" can penetrate it. To talk about the openness of life in Kojima's terms we would be dealing with the somatic ego and not the monad. On the other hand, Kojima's monad appears to be pervious to the ontic meaning of the other, in the form of the look. And we can step out of the monad in the form of a mood that always carries the nuance of the monad's accessibility to us. I am ultimately unable decide whether Kojima's monads have windows (or doors). If they do have windows, they are not windows in the ordinary sense of allowing all light to pass through them. They are screened, allowing only the ontic meaning of the other to pass through.

Labels: gaze, Husserl, Kojima, Leibniz, monadology, mood

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:33 AM. 0 comments

I've been playing fast and loose with thrownness. What exactly do I mean by existential thrownness? It's a way we find ourselves being in the world. But what has been thrown into what? Kojima (Monad and Thou) asks us to think of thrownness in terms of an ontological distinction between the whole of a monad and its naked core. Here is a longish excerpt which starts from a problem of monadological empathy:

[T]he appresentation of the other bodily-fleshly subject already has an ontological foundation in my somatic ego as the naked core of the monad. Through the separation from the monadic totality itself and the acceptance of the objectifiable body, the Being of its core (my somatic ego) is thrown into groundlessness and suffers an inner self-negation that brings forth ontological relativization and scattering (pluralizing) of the absolute Here into outside Theres. In other words, the absolute Here becomes the relative Here and recognizes the same relative Hereness in every There as potentiality. To call this phenomenon "empathy" in the usual sense is not appropriate, because this is not a one-sided projection of my absolute Being into others. On the contrary, my ego itself is already passively relativized and altered. Therefore there is already no longer an absolute Here surrounded by Theres, but rather a relative Here (Here = There) surrounded by equally relative Heres (Here = Theres). Thus my somatic ego deprived of the monad always already anticipates in primal belief the Being of others outside it. I do not introject my absolute Being into other bodies, but rather I rediscover an already anticipated alter ego in other bodies. Thus the analogical apprehension of the alter ego introduced by Husserl is only the occasional concretion and reconfirmation of this ontological anticipation.

Through this ontologico-analogical capacity of the naked core of the monad the existence of another core (somatic alter ego) is originally given to it. We are always already living together upon interperspectival, decentered, common ground as naked cores. The other monad (ego) as a totality is never given in such a way, however, for the absolute Hereness of a monad does not lie in its naked core, which is only the already half-relativized Here. What distinguishes the absolute Here from Here = There is the inner totality of the monad, the monadic spatio-temporal continuum. Without this total structure, the human exists as alienated monad like the nucleus of an atom that has been robbed of its electron shell. It exists there as distorted, as spontaneous indeed, but restricted in its freedom. Heidegger called just this way of being "thrownness."

(pp. 91-92)

Kojima designates the (co-)being of the core of the monad as real, and the being of the whole of the monad as potential, or, more specifically, the "potential Being of images" (p. 96). From his analysis of mood, it is clear that Kojima associates ownness (Jemeinigkeit) only with the monad as a whole and not with its naked core.

I have a couple of problems with this approach to thrownness, which goes to show that my existentialism is not at all sophisticated. I don't think of thrownness as debilitating, robbed, inauthentic or anything like that. And since I'm prone to wonder where the monad would be without its core, I have a hard time accepting that this core too isn't my own unswappable being, and that the continuum doesn't somehow derive its ownness from the ownness of its core.

Labels: Kojima, monadology, thrownness

posted by Fido the Yak at 3:54 PM. 0 comments

Kojima has gone Zen on me, which compels me to say that I'm as agnostic about Buddhisms as I am about theistic beliefs. However, I wouldn't want my agnosticism to get in the way of my enlightenment. I'll see if Kojima can't shed some light.

"[R]eligiousness," says Kojima, "means, in a specific sense, the immanent transcendence of the ego and of the world, but once these both have lost their common Being, religiousness is necessarily robbed of its ground, for the transcendence of religious intentions occurs only on the firm ground of this common Being" (Monad and Thou, p. 68). Kojima calls this common Being a "potential dimension of religiousness" (ibidem), implying that one can explore this ground philosophically without making a religious commitment.

It might be fair to say that for Kojima the lesson of Husserlian phenomenology is the discovery of life as the being of the ego. This focus on life is not without its problems, as Derrida has indicated. Kojima notes that in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl calls the stream of consciousness the "stream of life," and he notes further the many locutions about life ("original life," "transcendental life," "intentional life," "reflecting life") that Husserl employs; however, in his view Husserl never thematized life but rather treated it as self-evident (p. 72). Based on a quotation from an unpublished manuscript (EIII5), Kojima concludes that what Husserl means by life is a kind of will, something that founds the intentionality of consciousness. That is to say, according to Kojima's interpretation, Husserl grasps life in connection with objective recognition or perception. At the same time, Kojima argues, the life of the ego as such is not mediated by objective recognition or perception, but is an "immediate, nonreflective, living life" (p. 74). He wonders how this life can be thought, and he says that "life as ego can, in my opinion, be grasped only in its own space and time. That is to say, this ego can be grasped only in its original correlation with the world" (ibidem). The problem then becomes one of describing the spatiotemporality of the life of the ego which is irreducible to objective space and time. Kojima asks us to follow Husserl in mapping out a self-essential region to which belong "not only the immanent temporality of the stream of my experiences, but also the kinesthetic habituality of the ego and the spatial objects constituted by the ego," a region called the "monad" (ibidem).

"The spatial objects in my monad are correlated," Kojima summarizes Husserl's view, "not only through sensory perception but also through kinesthetic apperception of the incarnated ego, not unidirectionally but reciprocally, to my body as its only center" (p. 75). Husserlian temporality involves a now that, Kojima corrcetly notes, is not a punctual now, but a thick now with horizons of protention and retention, its thickness "originally constituted by the practical interest of the functioning ego" (ibidem). Kojima finds that in Husserl's "theory of space-constitution there is no argument concerning the temporal (self-accumulating) componets of the inner relating forces of the monad, while in his theory of time there is no argument that addresses the teleological manner of self-presencing of the monad," so he must therefore pursue this problem on his own (p. 76).

In spatiality Kojima discovers a phenomenon of depth. If three-dimensional space is constituted intersubjectively, that is, if the back of thing is understood as being the front of the thing for another (anonymous) person, we still do not know the being of the back, which can be grasped only from the inside of a thing. We intuit the being of a thing's back not by turning it around, but by going deeper into the core of thing.. The back designates the depth of a thing. "Everything present to the genuine individual ego as will has such a Being, namely, its depth" (p. 78). What does this mean for the life, for the being of the ego?

The Being of the ego is never to be grasped from outside, namely in objective space. The Being of the ego, which is to be grasped only from the inside, is nothing other than the will or life. However, we could also call it the (bodily) flesh (Leib), insofar as it is grasped as the nonobjectifiable starting point of praxis. The nonobjectifiable flesh as the practical starting point is my Being, which stands before and in the middle of the Being of things in the monad. My Being as flesh and the Being of things correlate with each other inseparably (I believe that the "inseparable" correlation of the ego and the constituted object in the Husserlian monad has its original source here). When I intuit one, the other is intuited at the same time. Therefore, we can say that both constitute a kind of ontological pairing. All the pairing has a common pole in my (bodily) flesh.

(p. 79)

Kojima's idea of ontological coupling raises, I think, rather than solves a problem of ontological difference. Of course he doesn't see the problem quite this way. He would have us attend to an "infinite" depth of being, a solitary being at home in vast spatial continuum, and he calls this space the genuine monad, the authentically "most primordial region in the Husserlian sense" (ibidem). My reading of this is that continuum may indeed be deep, but its depth is not infinite. That may be because my understanding of existence is naive. But let's proceed with Kojima's argument.

Kojima holds that the thickness of the present, like the size of the monad, is infinite. Furthermore:

[T]he definitive size of the monad and the definitive thickness of the present correspond to each other through the mediation of the kinesthesis of my life. However, it is also the case that without any practical teleology and without kinesthesis, the infinite size of the monad and the infinite thickness of the standing-present correspond to each other through the mediation of my Being as will. Here space and time are not separated from each other. Rather, they are two sides of one and the same matter. We have reached at last the original unity of the ego and the world, or that of space and time. We will call this unity the continuum of life, or the monad in the genuine sense.

(p. 80, Kojima's emphasis)

Well, we have here genuine monad said of two slightly different things, but perhaps that is a trifle. The key idea is that we identify life as being a continuum, and that we then identify this continuum with the monad. Kojima does not appear to be afraid of solipsism at this juncture; indeed, it's as if he thought the problem of solipsism were one of false beliefs rather than one of isolation, for he insists on the solitary nature of existence and the truth of the continuum (p. 81).

Now, here comes the Zen (which one might see impacting all of Kojima's thinking up to this point). Kojima says that Zen Buddhism "is not only transcendent to the continuum but is from the beginning also immanent to it. Zen is immanent-transcendent to the continuum" (p. 82). Immanence, it seems, has to do with the interpenetration of absolute, eternal present moments: the beings of the entire world, following Dogen, "are connected continuously and always live in an absolute present" (p 83). By transcendence, Kojima means transcendence towards the continuum of life. (I don't believe he's even minutely troubled by the circularity of a transcendence of where you are towards where you are, if that in fact is his meaning.) And yet, citing Suzuki's interpretation of the Kegon Sutra, he presents the idea that "infinite time is a moment, and a moment is infinite time; likewise a point is infinite space and infinite space is a point," or, more concretely, the universe is included in the tip of a paintbrush, or when we lift a finger we can cover the whole universe. He concludes from this:

Here we can see that immanence to the monadic continuum and transcendence of it onto the objective world are united. In other words, here the monadic ego identifies itself with a thing in thing and at the same time a monad. I am a corporeal thing and at the same time a monad. We must still pay attention to the fact that all things in the world are also granted their own monads. Absolute individuality is guaranteed to all things, not only to the human being.

(Ibidem, my emphasis)

This is a little unclear to me because Kojima really does say "transcence toward the continuum of life" and "transcendence of it [the monadic continuum] onto the objective world" all on the same page. I would like to question whether the former possibility presumes more harmony of wills than is evident in daily life. If I were to cover your universe with the tip of my finger I might expect you to protest.

I find it comforting to think that my philodendron has its own monad, but I don't think the rock can have a monad by Kojima's definition because I don't believe it has a continuum of life. I'm not sure that the rock has being like a living being, much less depth of being, and I think granting it monad status raises a problem of other monads (monad as other) that bleeds into Kojima's entire monadology. Can the depth (the continuum) of the other monad be transcended? Again, if I were to transcend your depth you might protest more vociferously than a rock. Kojima doesn't intend for us to question the transcendence of depth in this way, but I think the question arises from his approach. Of course it's possible that in raising such questions I am grossly misunderstanding what Kojima is getting at.

Zen Buddhism appears to be helpful if the problem is to find one's place in the universe, and yet if the real problems of living are narrower, such as how to live with others, I'm not sure Zen is very useful. Kojima himself does seem aware of this problem, but his formulation of it is awkward. He asks, "What would a religiousness be like that transcends the immanence of the continuum not onto the thing in general but onto the human, who, unlike the things, casts a free gaze out of itself" (p. 84)? I call this awkward in part because I don't believe the free gaze adequately sums up the problem of the other monad.

So if I reject Zen with its insight into rocks, what am I left with? I have a question of the "immanent transcendence of the ego and of the world," where these entities are considered cojoined in the monad, the continuum of life, and I have the possibility of considering this as a kind of bodily praxis. It follows, I think, that the body does not place limits on my transcendce, but rather enables it. So again I am led to question whether this continuum of life is truly infinite or whether it is in fact limited in any way, even if its depth might be unspecifiable as it is lived. (Is there a mathematical concept of infinity at play here? How can such a concept be squared with existence?)

Labels: body, Buddhism, egology, Kojima, life, monadology, ontological difference, phenomenology, philodendron, rocks

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:54 AM. 0 comments

Kojima calls attention to the following section from Husserl's Crisis (I'm using Carr's translation because its handy):

We perform the epochē–we who are philosophizing in a new way–as a transformation of the attitude which precedes it not accidentally but essentially, namely, the attitude of natural human existence which, in its total historicity, in life and science, was never before interrupted. But it is necessary, now, to make really transparent the fact that we are not left with a meaningless, habitual abstension; rather, it is through this abstention that the gaze of the philosopher in truth first becomes fully free: above all, free of the strongest and most universal, and at the same time most hidden, internal bond, namely of the pregivenness of the world. Given in and through this liberation is the discovery of the universal, absolutely self-enclosed and absolutely self-sufficient correlation between the world itself and world-consciousness. By the latter is meant the conscious life of the subjectivity which effects the validity of the world, the subjectivity which always has the world in its enduring acquisitions and continues to actively shape it anew. And there results, finally, taken in the broadest sense, the absolute correlation between beings of every sort and every meaning, on the one hand, and absolute subjectivity, as constituting meaning and ontic validity in this broadest manner, on the other hand.

(§ 41)

For Kojima Husserl's thinking here marks a repudiation of his earlier Cartesianism, which is stunted by a premature "return to the subject." Kojima comments, "It is remarkable that here the consciousness produced by the epoché is no longer called pure consciousness but rather a world-consciousness, and that the correlation between consciousness and the world is emphasized rather than the self-sufficiency of consciousness itself" (Monad and Thou, p. 41). However, whereas Husserl stresses the freedom of the philosopher from the pregiven world, Kojima stresses the ineluctability of the world even in and through the epoché, and he designates this world as pregiven, as prethetic. Kojima turns to Husserl's argument in Experience and Judgement that the world is a precondition of all praxis, including the praxis of life and the praxis of cognition, and he criticizes Husserl for not seeing the full meaning of this argument:

We may ask, however, does Husserl adequately grasp this world [of world-consciousness] in truth? Indeed, he attained a quite correct recognition of pregivenness, indubitable certainty, and the passivity of the world. However, he fails, it seems, to gain an authentic insight into the profoumd relevance of the "pre-thetic" character of the world insofar as we can tell from Experience and Judgement. As a result he did not discover the prethetic self (Existence) thematically as the necessary indubitable correlate of this world. His regress to the ideal region of "transcental subjectivity" begins anew.

That he did not recognize the authentic meaning of the "pre-positionality" of the world is clearly shown by the fact that he identified this world immediately with the life-world, the field of intersubjective daily praxis. However, as he himself acknowledged elsewhere, this world is the precondition or the universal basis of all praxis; therefore it is the precondition or the basis of the life-world and is not the life-world itself.

If we confuse the reduction of the pre-thetic world with the reduction to the life-world, the pre-thetic self will inevitably become entangled in a chaos of various theses through the reduction, among them the kinesthetic thesis. According to this account Husserl must again refrain from any commitment to the general thesis of the world and must insist on the reduction to solitary transcendental subjectivity as the second stage of the epoché, as can be seen in First Philosophy and in the Crisis. As a result, the life-world, including the psychological ego, becomes an integration of intentional objects that must be constituted by transcendental subjectivity alone, though on the basis of an anonymous pregivenness. One cannot deny the (somewhat lukewarm) resonance of Cartesianism even in Husserl's latest period of thought.

(pp. 46-47)

I recall that for Husserl of the Cartesian Meditations the intrinsically first being is transcendental intersubjectivity (§ 64), so in one sense the discovery of world-consciousness is a minor modification of Husserl's phenomenology. Perhaps the key issue revolves around what steps one takes to discover the first being and then what steps one takes after such a being has been discovered. And yet we may wonder at why Husserl didn't discover existence as the "necessary indubitable correalate of this world" if indeed such is the case. What qualities does existence have (worldliness, disposition, a relation to others) that transcendental subjectivity lacks? Can we discover these qualities through the epoché, or does the phenomenological method require that we return to the subject?

Before I get to Kojima's conclusions, I want to explore a few of the ramifications of his analysis so far. The first ramification is that the thesis of intentionality is undermined. Consciousness, according to Kojima, is consciousness of the pregiven world before it is consciousness of something (p. 44). Is this simply to say that the horizon is a universal originary fact of consciousness? Well, Kojima's model for world-consciousness is not perception but imagination. This, I think, ties into another elaboration of his analysis, concerning the problem of embodiment.

Renaud Barbaras, as you may remember, holds that embodiment pertains to the subject because the structure of phenomenality demands it (see The Uniqueness of the World). Kojima puts forward a similar kind of argument, but whereas Barbaras would have us broaden our understanding of perception to get to this point, Kojima sees phenomenality as the business of the imagination. As I understand it, Kojima is saying that embodiment is an aspect of thrownness, and the agent of throwness is our old friend transcendental subjectivity. Hmm. It's a little difficult for me tell where Kojima's critical interpretation of Husserl leaves off and his own thinking begins. Let me recount what he says on the matter.

At this point we are aware that this stage of transition from the pre-thetic, pregiven world to the general thesis of the life-world, on the side of the world, must correspond exactly to that of the transition from the pre-thetic self to the transcendental corporeal (somatic) ego, on the side of the subject. The pre-thetic self as the primordial form of Existence is necessarily thrown into the common general-thetic world by the radical reflection of transcendental subjectivity, and it is given the kinesthetic vestment of voluminosity (body-schema) and becomes a corporeal ego. This voluminosity or spatial corporeity of the ego accompanied by the nonreflective transcendental consciousness is able to constitute a similar voluminosity analogically around any image given from the world at a stroke through the transcendental principle of coupling. This is to say that to constitute an object in the life-world we need no complete sythetic convergence of images. A certain image will associatively call up an optimum image and then, tout à coup, an inner horizon will be established around it through transcendental coupling (what Husserl describes in section 38 of the Cartesian Meditations as primal foundation or Urstiftung through passive synthesis seems to coincide with this, at least as a result).

Therefore, the pre-thetic world and the pre-thetic self do not suddenly disappear even in the establishment of the general thesis of the life-world by transcendental subjectivity. Rather, the pre-thetic world remains as the dimension of the optimum image of the object and its meaning, and the pre-thetic self remains as the dimension of imagination and projection.

(pp. 49-50)

Kojima has intended to show that the proper agent of transcendental reflection is not the transcendental ego, as Husserl believed, but the somatic ego (p. xii). Its puzzling that he says this and then posits a thrownness into corporality by the radical reflection of a transcendental subjectivity. Kojima's somatic ego appears to be more a creature of phenomenality than a being defined by its existential thrownness into the world. Well, I have my doubts. He concludes:

We are not primal transcendental subjectivity as an ego that is able to posit everything including its own essence, nor are we primordial world-Being as a nature-monad that produces everything in its own image. We are rather a Being-in-between with double subjectivities, defined by both extremities, whose somatic inbetweenness should be the theme of investigation for future philosophy....

(p. 63).

I don't how far I'd travel down that road, but I reckon that Kojima is right in noticing world-consciousness as a problem and in seeing its relation to the problem of embodiment.

Labels: Barbaras, body, epoché, Husserl, intentionality, Kojima, lifeworld, phenomenology, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:28 PM. 0 comments

I have been reading against Kojima's account of time consciousness (Monad and Thou, Chapter 3) with the question in mind, What if time exists prior to any constitution of time? Is it possible, I wonder, for anything to escape the flux? As Heraclitus said, "everything gives way and nothing stays put" (panta chôrei kai ouden menei). Kojima's analysis, however, is extremely delicate. It will not be possible to get around it by simply disavowing idealism. In human terms, the issue is to imagine how it is possible for a person to endure over the course of a life; if we answer that it isn't possible, we are left with the uncomfortable fact that the various moments of my life all seem to belong to me, despite any changes that I may have undergone. So what's going on here?

Kojima asks us to acknowledge the existence of a "somatic ego," which (perhaps not yet "who") is not given "solely through self-reflection but also through the reflective-nonreflective mode of the self-consciousness of life" (p. 22).

Sartre introduced the concept of être-pour-soi or conscience non-positionelle de soi in connection with this probelematic, but he failed to connect it structurally to any reflective mode of self-consciousness. The nonreflective and reflective modes of self-consciousness are dialectically or circularly connected to each other, and no one can grasp either one of them without refering to the other. Indeed, self-reflection has as its necessary premise the nonreflective cognition of self, while the latter cognition progressively assimilates reflective recognition in the flow of time and thus builds itself up.

(p. 22)

I'll note in passing that Kojima may be asking us to accept a broadened concept of cognition. A key point, however, is that in linking the two modes of self-consciousness, Kojima is presenting us with an anthropological philosophy of life. Philodendrons need not apply.

Kojima then considers, following Husserl, two ways of understanding the present: (1) as the flowing now, a series of now moments that flow one after the other, and (2), as the standing present, "that which remains still at the origin of the flow and never flows itself" (p. 22). Before we jump to a critique of the standing present, let's see where Kojima is heading with this idea. Although he regards the flowing now and the standing present as analytically separable, he also sees a dialectical relation between them. Just as the non-reflective mode of life precedes and makes possible the reflective mode of life, the standing present, it is argued, precedes and makes possible the flowing now. This correspondence is no accident, in Kojima's view, "for the standing present is nothing other than the temporal form of presencing proper to the nonreflective mode of consciousness, and the flowing now is the form of presencing proper to the reflective mode of that consciousness" (p. 23).

Kojima's insistence on the stillness of the standing present leads him to discount the notion that the standing present is a dividing point between the future and the past, with time flowing in one direction from the future to the past. In his view the standing present is absolutely still. Yet, like the absolute Hereness of the ego, it "cannot be grasped thematically from any reflective standpoint because it is the dimension of the absolute encounter between consciousness and transcendent objects as well as the absolute encounter between consciousness and its own Being-in-the-world, namely the kinesthetic living body (Leib-Körper)(p. 23). Now, Kojima seems to argue that the fact that the standing now and the flowing nows exist on different levels can lead us to conclude that it is meaningless to describe the proper length of the standing present without reference to the flowing nows (p. 24). I'm not quite following how that argument that leads to that conclusion, but he wants to draw our attention to the "deep structure" of the standing present, so we can try to follow him there. He argues that "what connects the different nows to each other is the effect of a vertical intentionality that accumulates past moments into momentary simultaneity" (p. 24). I would like to question how stillness pertains to vertical intentionality, but we can go a little deeper yet into Kojima's analysis.

The conscious flow of passing nows and the standing present as its origin have a common immobile bottom ground called life (or the Lieb-layer of the somatic ego). This life never flows (contrary to many current interpretations of it) but stays still as a kind of nunc stans extending in indefinite continuity from the immediate present in the direction of the past. For example, my "I," as a time-object, is always changing in the flow of time. My I of five years ago and my I of now are quite different as time objects. For the sake of the continuity of life itself, however, both I's are always perceived to be exactly the same (except, perhaps, in a psychiatric case). This is to say that my identity as "I" has its ground in the standing present of life or of the somatic ego in its nonreflective stance. My somatic ego is always presented to itself as the same ego. The Leib-layer of the somatic ego underlying the I of five years ago persists in the standing present in the broadest sense, even though my I is passing away and thus varying as a time-object. Therefore I can ascertain that my I of five years ago and my I now belong to the same standing present, as the somatic ego in its nonreflective stance. This is what I do each time that I recognize my identity. The duration of time objects, for example, of a melody or of sensory data, is achieved through a reflex of the identity of my somatic ego. When the flowing nows with their contents are grasped in a quasi-direct relation to the continuity of my life-ego, that is, of their immobile ground, they appear under the phase of duration (That the duration given through noematic sense is also a modification of this type of duration will be indicated later.) Each flowing now is not connected to next through the retained memory of other nows mirrored into itself, but only through its continuous ground, namely, through life and the somatic ego. Only such duration causes the retention of the flowing now, because it flows away from the original present while nevertheless remaining still in the same present in a wider sense (with relation to life).

(pp. 25-26)

Before lauching into a critique there's just one more idea I want to get out there. "Vertical intentionality shows that time never ceases to flow, while time consciousness itself does not flow," Kojima says (p. 27). This precisely indicates what we're up against if we take up the argument that life never stands still.

Clearly Kojima has considered the possibility that life itself in flux. Why does he reject this idea? Let's ask three related questions: (1) In what sense can the ground of time consciousness be said to be immobile; (2) In what sense can it be said to be continuous; and (3), In what sense can it be said to be a ground?

The identity of my somatic ego appears to be nontransferable. Reproduction is a biological fact, and this would seem to have some connection to my body, and yet it doesn't seem possible for me to swap identities with my offspring. There's a fixity in the question of identity from this perspective, and if we associate this kind of self-awareness with a level of the somatic ego, or the fact of embodiment, we seem to saying that having a body cannot be understood solely from an objective viewpoint, that it contains an element, a reflexive if nonreflective awareness, that is purely subjective. However, does this really speak to the stillness of the standing present? Could there be such a thing as a walking present, a present in which successive I points are taken as belonging together, yet as not being exactly identical, just as one step is not exactly identical to the next step when we go for a walk?

How then would we explain the continuity of the standing present? Can we be certain that it is continuous? Possibly in dreams we can change our identity, become somebody who is not continuous with our waking self. If all of the characters who populate our dreams are in fact avatars of the self, we may still question the continuity of self-identity. Its continuity could be maintained by passing through, for instance, the unconscious, or through the body. In the latter case would we have to understand the body as something different from Kojima's Leib-layer of the somatic ego, even to pose the question of whether there is in fact a continuity? In other words, are we dealing with a presumption here rather than something that is self-evident. I'm not sure, because the continuity of the waking self does seem to be in evidence. The problem is how to explain that in light of what's possible in dreams.

We may question whether time-consciousness is grounded in the somatic ego. Is there any sense in which time-consciousness might be grounded in time itself? If that were the case, would we have to admit that time itself does not have a purely objective meaning, but rather it is also manifested subjectively? That's a hard one. The alternative would seem to be acknowledging a disconnect between time and time-consciousness. Or, on the other hand, we could question the idea of grounding. Perhaps there is no true grounding, but a relative positioning in timespace. Or a pure groundlessness. On that note, I'd like to summon up Ernesto Grassi, and his conclusion to his consideration of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

Can it be that the only valid thing left is the appeal of the abyss, wherein we exist as characters playing our assigned parts in a quick succession of scenes and acts? Will we ever overcome the cruelty of the appeal of existence, which reveals itself as indifference for the individual, as the relentless demand on the individual to play an everchanging succession of roles? And as a result, will we never cease to wonder whether passions pertain to human beings at all, or whether they are solely the expression of the magical essence of life?

(The Primordial Metaphor, p. 94)

Finally, then, Kojima is fully aware that he arguing against a doctrine of panta rhei. He rejects the idea that life is in flux, despite the observable fact that the body undergoes changes in the course of a life, because the evidence from his own consciousness tells him that his previous identities are continuous with and, indeed, exactly the same as his current identity. I think Kojima's way of thinking may lead to an impasse. Nevertheless, I'm not sure if there is a way to think the problem of time-consciousness without coming to an impasse, so I think at the very least Kojima offers us an interesting way to begin to think about the problem.

Labels: body, egology, Grassi, Heraclitus, Kojima, life, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 3:43 PM. 19 comments

Kojima argues that because phenomenology cannot prove that the transcendental ego persists when the psychological ego falls asleep, it is dogmatic to presume "even a relative independence of the transcendental ego from the psychological ego" (Monad and Thou, p. 19). We might provisionally say yes in answer to my earlier question, Does the cogito sleep?. Kojima goes on to say:

We can now reinterpet the genetic self-realization of the transcendental ego in Husserl's account in the opposite direction such that it becomes the special reflective-nonreflective mode of the psychological ego or of life itself.* Life does not need a transcendental master directing and dominating it from above. It has within itself the light that enables it to reflect upon itself and to enrich its own content. Is this not what Husserl wanted to convey with the expression "the transcendental life"? The task of phenomenology should not be to establish the predominance of the so-called transcendental ego, but rather to secure the light inherited from life itself and to develop the wisdom gained by it to illuminate the opacity of the life-world.

(p. 20)

I'm inclined to imagine that if the lifeworld appears opaque, it is life as much as the world that contributes to its opacity. If we believe that life inherently has the means of self-reflection, must we also believe that life is transparent? I'm just not sure.

* Kojima says in a footnote (p. 229, No. 21), "It seems clear that if the agent of phenomenological relfection (reduction) is not the transcendental ego but life itself, this reflection should necessarily return to the nonreflective mode of life."

Labels: egology, Kojima, life, lifeworld

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:20 AM. 0 comments

The époché, properly performed, has the potential to liberate space from mere objectivity. This is a strong claim put forward by Hiroshi Kojima in Monad and Thou: Phenomenological Ontology of Human Being. He says that "[s]pace as the schema of interintentionality is neither mere subjectivity nor mere objectivity" (p. 9). Well, a lot of philosophy claims to be neither subjective nor objective. The problem seems to be that in working out such a perspective, philosophers make assumptions that tacitly require the a priori existence of either a subjective or an objective reality. Let's look at how Kojima proposes to work the problem out, and see if he manages to avoid any obvious pitfalls.

Husserl failed, in Kojima's view, to recognize the originary plurality of the transcendental consciousness (pp. 4-5). Consequently his view of intersubjectivity is narrowly egological. Other egos are not only discovered after an empathic introjection of one's own consciousness into other bodies; rather, they are present from the gitgo in the fabric of consciousness. "The intentionalities of other egos are not," Kojima insists, "noemata of my intentionality; rather they are co-noeses with mine" (p. 5). How could we know that our noetic faculty wasn't purely or merely our own, that there exists something like a conoesis in every moment of consciousness? Kojima thinks we can answer this question by reexamining the problem of "appresentation," as outlined by Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. The key question here is, How do we know that things have a behind? How do we know that there is a rear aspect to things we perceive? Kojima doubts that it's my intentionality that appresents the behind of things. Neither can the appresentation of a behind of things be explained as an "empty" intention. Here Kojima presents a logical objection (and draws a rather startling conclusion):

In order even to turn a thing over, I must know in advance that it has another side! Thus the back of a thing cannot be defined by my empty intention, to be fulfilled in turning the thing around. Rather my intention directed toward the reverse side is empty, or imperfect, because it is not originally my intention.

(p. 6)

It's instructive at this point to contrast Kojima's take on the imperfectness of perception with Barbaras' riff on adumbrations. Barbaras thinks that Husserl's insight into perception points to a new kind of being, being-at-a-distance, and the inexhaustibility of perception ultimately points to the impossibility of satisfying desire, which is the heart of the living subject. For Kojima, on the other hand, it seems that the same set of ideas about perception would lead to a questioning of the intentionality of consciousness, concluding that the ownness of an intention towards an object of perception can not be taken for granted.

So how does this tie into the idea of a spatial schema that is neither objective nor subjective? Kojima directs his critique of Husserlian intersubjectivity towards the analysis of Here and There in the Cartesian Meditations.

As reflexively related to itself, my animate bodily organism (in my primordial sphere) has the central "Here" as its mode of givenness; every other body, and accordingly the "other's" body, has the mode "There." This orientation, "There", can be freely changed by virtue of kinesthesias. Thus, in my primordial sphere, the one spatial "Nature" is constituted throughout the change in orientations, and constituted moreover with an intentional relatedness to my animate organism as functioning perceptually. Now the fact that my bodily organism can be (and is) apprehended as a natural body existing and movable in space like any other is manifestly connected with the possibility expressed in the words: By free modification of my kinesthesias, particularily those of locomotion, I can change my position in such a manner that I convert any There into a Here–that is to say, I could occupy any spatial locus with my organism.

(Cartesian Meditations, § 53, Husserl's emphases)

For Husserl it seems that the core experience of other people rests on an imaginative possibility (as if) of Here becoming There (§ 54). Kojima comments that "the essence of Husserl's theory of intersubjectivity lies not in pairing-association nor in appresentative empathy, but rather in the possibility of removing the center from Here to There" (p. 8). Kojima objects to this analysis because in order for it to hold water one would have to imagine "a kind of 'objective,' homogeneous space quite independent of the position of the center," a space in which everything can be seen from a plurality of perspectives "prior to any movement of the body" (p. 8, emphasis mine). The joining of every presentation of There to an appresentation of Here, egologically, means that Husserl's intersubjectivity, according to Kojima, presupposes the existence of other consciousnesses before it thematizes the bodies of others (p. 9). Thus Kojima's critique is twofold.

It's difficult to evaluate Kojima's critique at this point because he has not yet presented his idea of the somatic ego, nor has he elaborated his analysis of the Here, the absolute, immovable center of experience. If he thinks that we can arrive at a spatial schema of interintenionality without presuming other consciousnesses before thematizing other bodies, then he might mean to say that the ability to apperceive the behind of things is a bodily knowledge, and, perhaps, that it is interintentional because it is embodied. We'll see.

Finally, I have to ask whether sounds have a behind. If the answer is no, then I think Kojima's project of philosophizing a space that is neither objective nor subjective might be in jeopardy, because it would appear that acoustic space and visual are constituted differently and quite possibly subjectively–that is, we could imagine a space in which vibrations occured without concern for whether they were heard or seen, but this space would not be consistent with our experience of space. On the other hand, we might answer yes, it is possible to apperceive the rear aspect of a sound. If that's the case, we might wonder about the position of silence in space, whether it can ever be absolute, and whether it is constituted conoetically.

Labels: epoché, Husserl, intentionality, intersubjectivity, Kojima, noesis, perception, silence

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:03 AM. 4 comments