Fido the Yak

The living body, Hans Jonas says, is the memento of the question "What is being?" (The Phenomenon of Life, p. 19). Whereas in Jonas' view the worlds of matter and of thought are both equally abstractions, the living body is concrete, and only on the basis of its concreteness and authenticity can ontology free itself from the deadening impact of the dualistic antithesis (p. 22). Although Jonas does not cite Maine de Biran, his thinking about the living body seems to be indebted to the French philosopher. He argues, against Kant, that causality is not a category of the understanding, not an a priori basis of experience, but rather is itself a basic experience, an experience rooted in "the effort I must make to overcome the resistance of worldly matter in my acting and to resist the impact of worldly matter upon myself. This happens through and with my body, with its extensive outwardness and its intensive inwardness at once, which both are genuine aspects of myself. And advancing from my body, nay, myself advancing bodily, I build up in the image of its basic experience the dynamic image of the world–a world of force and resistance, action and inertia, cause and effect" (p.23, emphasis Jonas'). I'll return to the issue of anthropomorphism here, but first I want to point out that this line of thinking about effort emerges in response to Hume.

Hume admits that "the animal nisus, which we experience, though it can afford no accurate precise idea of power, enters very much into that vulgar, inaccurate idea, which is formed by it." This admission comes in a footnote to a paragraph that reads:

We may, therefore, conclude from the whole, I hope, without any temerity, though with assurance; that our idea of power is not copied from any sentiment or consciousness of power within ourselves, when we give rise to animal motion, or apply our limbs to their proper use and office. That their motion follows the command of the will is a matter of common experience, like other natural events: But the power or energy by which this is effected, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable.

(See also Brandon's post on Hume's dismissal of animal nisus.) So is nisus unknown and conceivable, does it enter into a vulgar and innacurate idea, or is it rather, following Maine de Biran, immediately and incontestably known? Jonas takes the latter view, a way of thinking that leads him to a defense of anthropomorphism.

Are causes, including final causes, a part of nature? Jonas sees natural science's prejudice against teleology as but a phase in science's struggle against anthropomorphism (p. 36). If causality belongs to human nature, will natural science go so far as to alienate the human being from his own nature, to deny that the experience of effort has meaning (p. 37)? Alternatively, could natural science embrace anthropomorphism?

Perhaps, rightly understood, man is the measure of all things–not indeed through the legislation of his reason but through the exemplar of his psychophysical totality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness known to us: a completeness from which, reductively, the species of being may have to be determined by way of progressive ontological subtraction down to the minimum of bare elementary matter (instead of the complete being constructed from this basis by cumulative addition). The question is still open whether life is a quantitative complexification in the arrangement of matter, and its freedom and puposiveness nothing but an apparent blurring of its simple, unambiguous determinacy through the massed complexity as such (a fact of our bafflement rather than of its own nature)–or whether, contrariwise, "dead" matter, as one extreme of a spectrum, represents a limiting mode of the properties revealed by feeling life, their privative reduction to the near-dwindling point of inchoateness: in which case its bare, inertial determination would be dormant, as yet unawakened freedom. The ontological justification for this question lies in the fact that the living body is the archetype of the concrete, and being my body it is, in its immediacy of inwardness and outwardness in one, the only fully given concrete of experience in general.

(pp. 23-24, emphases Jonas')

Whew. Jonas' ontological argument appears solid to me, but it's hard to imagine that natural science will realign itself to follow an anthropomorphic ontology. What science demands of its theories is that they explain more or explain better than established theories. (I had a similar sort of reaction to Grace de Laguna's foray into biology in On Existence and the Human World.) It will be interesting to see how Jonas develops the anthropomorphic idea as he tackles evolution, metabolism, DNA and other well studied topics in biology.

Labels: anthropomorphism, body, de Laguna, Hume, Jonas, Maine de Biran, ontology

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:09 PM. 0 comments

Henry's phenomenological body is both spontaneity and habit: spontaneity insofar as it is absolute subjectivity, and habit insofar as is it a power of repetition. It is also memory, but memory of a peculiar kind: "it is because the body is memory, a memory, it is true, where the idea of the past does not yet arise, that it can also be a memory which remembers the past by making it the theme of its thought. The original memory of our body is habit, our body is, as we have said, the totality of our habits" (Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 101). For Henry, habit means the "real and concrete being of the ontological possibility." He says, "With regard to the world, it is the terminus of all our habits, and it is in this sense that we are truly its inhabitants. To inhabit, to frequent the world, such is the fact of human reality" (p. 96). (NB: I think "terminus" here has a specifically Biranian meaning.)

To frequent the world. Hmm. Here's a thesis that may clarify exacly where Henry is coming from: "Things are never present to the body in an experience which would bear within it the characteristic of having to be unique; rather they are always given to us as something which we will see again" (pp. 95-96). Always? That seems a little iffy. It does seem, though, to be the nature of the habitual.

One consequence of Henry's radical present, the realm of pure possibility, is that the faculty of assuefaction, to use Grassi's language, does not appear to be a problem for him. Habit is only ontological possibility, and the question of the acquisition of habits is neither here nor there.

Labels: body, Grassi, habit, Henry, Maine de Biran, memory, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:56 AM. 0 comments

What happens when we say "la la la la la"? Are we saying "la" five times, or is there a sense of doing one thing, saying "la la la la la"? If there's a sense of unity to saying "la la la la la," where does that come from? What kind of phenomenon is it?

A longish excerpt from Henry:

The determination of the original being of the body as subjective movement furnishes us with the principle of a phenomenology of memory whose possibility thus rests entirely on the ontological theory of the body. When a sound is heard, the sonorous impression is constituted, but the subjective movement in which the power of constitution here at work consists is originally known as such, because it is given to us in an internal transcendental experience. It is precisely the possession of the interior law of constitution of the sonorous impression which allows me to repeat this impression, to reproduce it myself again as many times as I care to, and to recognize it constantly in the course of this reproduction, because the knowledge of the power of constitution is immanent to its exercise and is one with it. That which repeats the sonorous impression is the body, and consequently, the ego–which amounts to saying that the power of constitution of the sonorous impression is the ego itself. As long as I repeat the sonorous impression, I know that I have already had the experience of this impression; I know that I now repeat it, that it is I who repeat it, and that it is the same impression of which I already had the experience which I now repeat. Actually, the remembering which is implied in this phenomenon is divided into a remembering of the power of constitution, a remembering which is the repetition strictly speaking, and a remembering of the sonorous impression which is a remembering of the repeated or reproduced terminus. The first remembering takes place on the level of transcendental immanence, it is produced without the intervention of any constitution and is known itself as such interiorly and immediately. The second type of remembering concerns the transcendent level on which the sonorous impression is constituted before being recognized and repeated there. To the first sort of remembering Maine de Biran gave the name "personal remembering," to the second the name "modal remembering."

(Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 80).

William James, by contrast, argues that strictly speaking it is impossible to hear the same sound twice (Principles of Psychology: Chapter IX, The Stream of Thought). James says the apprehension of sameness in the case of the repeated sound is a matter of referring two different sensations to the same object. It is impossible to hear two instances of the same sound with the same brain, because the brain is always changing. And so is experience. Experience for James is always in flux, "the river of life, the river of elementary feeling." What's true of hearing is also true of thinking. We can't experience the same idea twice, can't think two instances of the same idea with the same brain.

Yet we commonly do believe that we can think the same idea twice, or hear the same sound again. To explain this belief James credits language for an assist, and he speculates that if we spoke a more agglutinating language the tendency to believe we could think the same idea twice would be lessened. Having learned a couple of Bantu languages, albeit imperfectly, I don't quite buy it. I think it shows, however, how James may be failing to review all the options. If there is an assist factor, if there is something that helps us believe we can hear the same sound repeated, and grasp a unity there, it plausibly comes from a bodily capacity of remembering, from Biranian personal remembering.

Is personal memory then fundamentally illusory? Does it lend itself to illusion? The question, I think, is whether the power of constitution of sonorous impressions remains constant, or whether it is in flux, whether it develops or changes at all in the course of life. And what kind of constancy would we be talking about? Just enough to talk about what happens when we say "la la la la la"? More broadly it becomes a question of how memory works existentially.

James' view, which seems reasonable, is at least partially true to experience. I can acknowledge that every "la" is singular from the outset, but when I string together this "la" and that "la", "la la la la la," it feels like a repetition, and there is some sense of unity in it. And yet if I attend closely, the singularity of each "la" becomes apparent. What James says about the flux of experience seems to be true, but it also seems that he isn't telling the whole story. On the other hand, if we apply his insights to Henry's Biranian analysis, it seems that Henry has left some questions unanswered. At the end of the day, I can't say exactly what happens when we say "la la la la la."

Labels: body, experience, Henry, James, Maine de Biran, memory, repetition

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:21 AM. 0 comments

Does the Biranian body ever learn to do anything, or does it immediately know everything it knows about movement, everything it needs to know? Henry's Biranian children are like this, already knowing how to run and play. We say an ungulate hits the ground running, but in reality it takes a few minutes for the young ungulate to learn how to walk. What's going on in these first few moments? Does the ungulate learn to use its body, or does it learn its body in some non-instrumental way? If we accept the immediacy of the felt movement, how do we then account for the body's learning? So much of the human's ontogeny is given over to learning, I'd say the human body is the learned body par excellence, the body as it is learned. Can immediacy do justice to the body as it is learned?

Labels: body, Henry, learning, Maine de Biran

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:57 PM. 0 comments

Some snippets from Henry's reading of Maine de Biran:

The determination of the being of the ego by the internal structure of a mode of manifestation truly has an ontological meaning; the positing which it accomplishes is not of "some thing," of a "being" in the sense that common or philosophical thought undestands it, viz. the positing of a being, because this "some thing" is rather constituted by its "how" and by the internal structure of its mode of manifestation.

Thus the designation of the being of the ego as identical to that of subjectivity signifies that, for Maine de Biran, the ego is not a being.

(Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 37.)

Henry will go further to say that the ego is not actually constituted. This is to be understood as a reading against Kant:

The category is identified in its original being with the very being of the ego; it is no longer possible for the latter to be a sort of object known by means of the category or constituted by it in any way whatever. The deduction has this primary consequence of tearing the being of the ego away from the sphere of transcendent being in general, which is always the product of a constitution. The ego, on the other hand, is not constituted, it cannot be so long as it is one in its being with the category, i.e. with the power of constitution in general, as long as it is itself such a power.

(p. 38.)

So the ego is not being, but it has ontological meaning, and Henry speaks of its "very being." Clearly Henry wants us to think of being in two different senses, one pertaining to the sphere of transcendence, the other pertaining to the sphere of absolute immanence. What about the question of the constitution of being? Is "constituted" to be taken in two different senses, or is this simply a contradiction?

One more passage:

The belonging of the categories to the sphere of the absolute immanence of subjectivity, which is also the sphere of the ego, leads us to the understanding of the fundamental relationship between the ego and ontological knowledge. Experience presupposes a condition of possibility which is ontological knowledge itself; the analysis of the categories is the bringing to light of the structure of this ontological knowledge. Philosophy begins with the questioning of such knowledge without which there would be nothing for us. But philosophy does not merit being called a first philosophy unless it takes this problematic as far as it can, and unless it deliberately takes up the task of determining in rigorous fashion the very being of ontological knowledge

.

(pp. 40-41.)

Recalling that Henry has already claimed that "experience is its own source," I now wonder whether Henry isn't talking about an inflected form of experience. Call it "experience on trial." Or maybe he simply contradicts himself. Or maybe I'm too oafish to appreciate his subtleties. In any case, it's going to be difficult for me to draw conclusions from his work.

Labels: experience, Henry, Maine de Biran, ontology, phenomenology

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

Henry writes:

Against rationalism we must say that all knowledge is derived from experience because the condition for the possibility of experience is itself an experience. It is because the [Kantian] category was precisely for him an experience, and a specific experience, that Biran was able to circumscribe an absolutely original ontological region which, while being the source of all experience, was no less phenomenologically given and known.

(Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 25.)

Further:

Actually, what Maine de Biran requires of us is an identification of science with existence, i.e., an understanding that existence is already a science, not an imperfect or a provisional one, but the origin of all science, the origin of truth. The source of experience is not situated behind it but experience is its own origin.

(p. 26.)

This is like taking experience on faith. The argument "x is its own origin" precludes serious consideration of the question "How is x possible?" One might say that experience is different; experience is self-evident, not a matter of faith. But don't you still want to be able to ask, "How does experience come to be?" Naively, without any preconceptions. Isn't that a question worth asking?

Labels: experience, Henry, Maine de Biran, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:00 PM. 0 comments

Michel Henry asks:

Is not the fact that a consciousness has a body contigent fact, the contingent fact par excellence? Moreover, are we really in the presence of a fact? Rather, if the relationship sui generis of the body to consciousness rather proves to be the foundation of our idea of contingency, and more fundamentally, of the very fact that such a contingency and even contingent facts in general are possible for us, then does not this relationship truly constitute a structure, which is not only rooted in human nature, but which must further serve to define it?

(Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 2)

Where is Henry going with this? The question of the body leads toward a critique of the transcendental ego. Henry suggests that one way of proceeding is toward an existential realism that would have the courage to acknowledge and confront contingency, finitude and absurdity (p. 7). Another approach is to follow the Biranian discovery of the subjective body, the body which is an I. This latter approach is the path Henry will take.

Labels: body, contingency, Henry, Maine de Biran, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 3:11 PM. 0 comments

Jan Patočka writes: "A biological organism becomes a real person in the moment when I can do something on my own (i.e. move)."¹ In this passage Patočka has moved from Descartes discovery of personhood² to Maine de Biran's philosophy of effort, which provides the germ of Patočka's own unique contribution to the phenomenology of the body. Do you balk at equating personhood with motility? I do. Ask yourself, are spirochetes persons? In what sense are they or are they not persons? Because there is some sense to Patočka's argument here. Whatever else it is, being a person is a matter of having an orientation, of being embodied, necessarily. Patočka concludes this lecture by looking at how the body is thematicized:

Our body is a moment of a situation in which we are; it is not a thing. Just as a situation is a moment in a sequence of events with a definite structure and field of action, so our body is always a moment in an impersonal situation. Because our body is a situational concept, it has aslo the traits of human situation as such, that is, we cannot speak of it without noting that it places us in a certain reality, which is already present while at the same time lifting us out of it, in a way distancing us from it. Maine de Biran's hyperorganic power actually means that in a certain sense we are entirely body, no more, but in a certain sense also that we elude facticity.³

Here's a game. I can imagine playing a scale on the saxophone, a blues scale in G on an E^b sax. (The same exercise can be performed with a typewriter, basketball, chef's knife, whatever.) It takes some effort. It takes effort to suppress the urge to actually move my fingers. I can become conscious of making the effort to limit the exercise to a mental rehearsal of playing a scale. I can throw in hearing the tones, or breathing exercises. Is this effort the same quality of effort that is required to actually play a scale? I don't believe so.

All animals that play exhibit a quality of acting that goes beyond motility. They can act as if. The field of human interactions has yet another dimension, because only humans have material culture. (I am not ready to concede that Chimps have anything like a genuine material culture, though the evidence for it would be worth considering some time.) For the human being, personhood is largely a function of one's toys. If I know what kind of toys you have, I already know a lot about what kind of person you are.

Labels: body, life, Maine de Biran, Patočka, personhood, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:29 PM. 2 comments