Friday, September 11, 2009
The concept of experience implied in saying "experience as complex" presupposes something like originary experience prior to the construction of experience (and concomitantly it implies a spacetime prior to the constitution of spacetime, along with a self prior to self); experience in a paradoxical sense would have to consist of a congealment of itself, the freezing of itself in a moment together with. . . ? An interest in this together with prevents me from rejecting the paradox of recursive experience outright. Behind that question of experience's together with lies a horizon of metaphoricity (together with intentionality), behind which a horizon of comprehension, behind which a horizon of chiasmic reach, behind which a forest of heterogeneity. . . .
Touching on the topic of seeing together with the whole person, here is a quote from Nelson Goodman's Language of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols which takes its inspiration from Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation: "The eyes comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by and old and new insinuations of the ear, nose and tongue, fingers, heart and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism" (quoted in Corradi Fiumara, Metaphoric, p. 95).
At the risk of foreopening a question, I deliberately speak of the person and not the animal without therewith denying the animal. We are particularly human, Corradi Fiumara suggests, "to the extent that we manage a roundabout access instinctual depths" (p. 107). If metaphoric processes are conditions for attaining personhood, however, they also carry a destructurative potential. Person designates an ambiguous creature of (its "own") metaphoric processes. Metaphoricity "develops in conjunction with the creation of an intermediate space of ambiguities, extending between the individual self and the communal epistemology" (ibid., my emphasis on being in conjunction).
The crazy straw of experience can be imagined as synergistic. Cognitive synergy refers to, according to Corradi Fiumara, "the occurrence of incompatible properties being experienced simultaneously in relation to the development of one's identity" (p. 109). Simultaneity and origination, together with and incompatibility, synergy and play, recursion and recursion.
Labels: ambiguity, aporia, Corradi Fiumara, experience, metaphor, recursion
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Inquiry would be pointless without the possibility of error. However, the quest for accuracy, a modality of care which Corradi Fiumara justifiably identifies as a saliency of human thought (if it isn't perhaps the punctum saliens of inquiry in the main), seemingly contravenes a bona fide acceptance of error at any point during the course of inquiry. Once we admit the possibility of error the quashing of express errors during the course of inquiry becomes problematical. By disallowing for the appearance of error itself we betray error and so therefore implicitly compromise any commitment to inquiry, or else we follow a path away from noncontradictory reason—we error in refusing to accept error.
Perhaps the possibility of error resides in answers and not in questions? Yet the question envelops the answer. Dialogue, response, is as keenly an element of the question as oxygen is an element of water. To close the question against error by dismissal of wrong answers is to stray from inquiry in its dialogic essence, which isn't to say one can't reasonably dismiss any given answer as wrong, but simply to posit that such dismissals can't close the question as such against error.
Roughly I'm concerned with the flightpaths of inquiry here, at the expense, perhaps, of fixing boundaries. Are our expectations about inquiry altered as an investigation makes its way to its destination—we haven't yet settled questions of destinations, the manner in which questions are folded into an investigatory itinerary, causes of the question, consuetudinal structurations—or over the span of a career of philosophical inquiry, inquiry that calls itself into question? Do we start a philosophical inquiry with a question and then allow some latitude for error on the way to an answer? Does an initial question guide all subsequent questioning, set a trajectory that constrains all possible deviations? Do questions metamorphose under scrutiny? Are questions in the process of an inquiry like hinges, small joints that allow the doors of inquiry to swing shut and open? If inquiry is a revisionary process is the model of inquiry then also open to revision? Revisability as a facet of inquiry may imply the correction of errors but by the same token it would have to also imply the possibility of error.
While I can't wholeheartedly recommend an erratic pursuit of inquiries, neither can I recommend against it, and I can't quite see the reason why an erratic style of questioning need be regarded as inimical to philosophy. Avowedly I favor the peregrination, despite a few reservations and embarrassments. The adventure of philosophy must at some point pass through the ambiguity of the errant, acknowledge its existence rather than attempt to wish it out of being. As Corradi Fiumara argues, we must inquire into the unbearability of ambiguity, for surely "a measure of ambiguity allows for a constant search for ever greater accuracy" (Metaphoric, p. 80). The acknowledgment of ambiguity folds back on itself, methectically folds back into knowledge. The philosophical question offers not one single immiscible meaning but a multitude of perplications, the opening of a thousand paths of inquiry, a thousand exploits. There is no philosophical journey without exposure to error—and yet, yet, this conclusion is too comfortable. It feels wrong. If the inquiry comes full circle has it genuinely exposed itself to error?
Labels: ambiguity, Corradi Fiumara, error, peregrinations, questions
Friday, August 28, 2009
Let's begin by thinking of the temporality of the limit, the path between fields, for the limit is not tacked down but unfurls or advances–in a meaningful sense it consists of its own advance. The nature of its existence is existence, that is, the animate surpass, but much more can be said about it. We should want to know for instance whether the limit as such is necessarily schematicized. Schematicization is an aspect of embodiment, and if the limit were discovered to be a bodily phenomenon it should have this aspect. Things aren't so clear, however. We may know the limit bodily if not viscerally yet, as Morris says, "the body as a whole appears as a center of indeterminacy" (Sense, p. 66). The "body," not yet "my body," appears as the turning point of infinitions, as if the limit were, in order to be turned inside out, buried in the movements of the chiasm, earth and sprout. The limit must be passed through in order to be a limit. Such movements, infinitions, are schematicized, but the schema is not like a solid thing. It continuously arises from its own activation, autopoetically. The bodily schema, like Bergson's motor schema, is, to paraphrase Morris, a phenomenon of the limit, of chiasmic movement that (unlimitedly) limits itself (p. 67). The bodily schema unfolds in "real" time, as a limit, Morris insists (p. 69). In a sense then the limit becomes its asymptotic approach, the positioning of the telos that never quite arrives, a course of turns felt as the inhabitive cunicularity of styles of approach. The temporality of the cunicular leaps with studied suddenness, a leporine quality of both evasion and celebration, a novelty of approach; at the same time the world intrudes into the cunicular, earthy itself. The paradox of the leap: only in the leap does the earth becomes earth, take on its heaviness as earth. Earth as limit is turned inside out. Infinition reconfigures its own beyond, the repertoire of to/from structures native (as second nature) to existence within the leap. Says Morris, "The moving schema is already beyond itself, open to the world and development, ready to run into kinks that develop into new folds. The formation of such folds is a gross reorganization of body-world movement. . . that rearticulates our exploration and interaction with the world" (p. 70).
Labels: ambiguity, body, infinity, inhabitations, lagamorphs, Morris, peregrinations
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Isabelle Pantin writes about divergent conceptual universes revealed by an episode in the history of optics ("Simulachrum, species, forma, image: What Was Transported by Light into the Camera Obscura? Divergent Conceptions of Realism Revealed by Lexical Ambiguities at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century," Early Science and Medicine 13(2008), 245-269. The abstract:
At the end of the Renaissance, the complete understanding of the experiment of the camera obscura required dealing with the physical problem of the relationship between light and images. According to Kepler, this experiment demonstrated that the geometry and physics of light were one and the same thing and that there was no need for the luminous rays to transport any form of species. The Jesuits Fransiscus Auguilonius and Cristoph Scheiner were conscious of the superiority of Kepler's analysis of the camera obscura, but remained attached to the old theory of species. Scheiner's attitude was particularly significant. Although he had almost entirely assimilated the new Keplerian method of demonstration, he retained the traditional conception of realism. He still believed that the mediation of species was indispensable for making certain that what was seen was a real object.
I'll abstain from applying any lesson against relying on heterogeneous orders of knowledge in scientific endeavors, or against clinging to habits of thought that have been shown to be useless, because I have a few reservations about Pantin's conclusions. In the first place, and this might be worth glossing over if not for its irony, the evidence of exactly lexical ambiguity is weak and since, as Pantin points out, simulachrum, species, forma and imago are treated as synonymous by her sources, the question is really one of, in her words, "conceptual uncertainty." Perhaps an ambiguity in Kepler's restricted use of the word species allowed the basic concept of species to go unchallenged, for a brief moment in history, but what is most interesting in this case is the conceptual uncertainty. One might speak of cognitive dissonance if that term weren't so terribly abused–besides, one really has the sense of the passage of a whole order of knowledge rather than a simple belief. (How could it have been thought that people might have become inured to the passages of whole orders of knowledge?)
To be truthful it's not clear to me that any hard and fast demarcation between "lexical ambiguity" and "conceptual uncertainty" can be maintained, though it seems handy enough as a provisional gesture, and so with a due sense of humility I object to the following claim: Pantin says that the camera obscura "showed that light could create images independently of sensation" (256). I venture that this claim does not represent anthropomorphism–not in the way a speculative misanthropy would require us to think anthropomorphically, for instance–but I will also say that as far as I know light does not create anything and as far as I know only psychic, animate existentialities create images. Further, I don't know if can has anything at all to do with light. On the other hand, Pantin's conception of realism possibly does fall among those that resemble a (cryptodeistic) Mechanism or an enfeebled animism, that is, an animism that can't summon the strength to declare itself as a faith. Thus I must for the moment maintain an ambivalence as to whether to assign my dispute with Pantin's realism to lexical ambiguity or to conceptual uncertainty. Perhaps you have some clearer thought on the matter?
Labels: ambiguity, anthropomorphism, Auguilonius, camera obscura, irreality, Kepler, reality, Scheiner