Saturday, May 01, 2010
The presence of the listener is inscribed in the utterance. It is I who speaks, Jacques says, but we who say. He asks, "What happens to the philosophical status of the person if we replace the individual's cogito with the proposition 'I speak, but we say'? (Difference and Subjectivity, p. 9) For one thing the refutation of "I do not exist" becomes problematic.
But should we allow such a distinction between speaking and saying? Is there a speaking that says nothing, a babble that isn't somehow destined for language? Is there an impersonal babble? Perhaps. Perhaps necessarily.
What of the inscription of the presence of the listener in the utterance? This echoes an idea of the intertextuality of the utterance while at the same time it responds to Buber, to a sense of that everything in discourse is affected by relations between the I and the you. The listener is not merely referred to but is there in the interlocutive event. Present. We won't shy away from the idea. It's difficult. How do we describe the presence of the listener? How does the listener appear? As the "other side of language," i.e., perhaps it need not be apparent at all? As an ethical constraint? Imperative? Does the listener present us with an imperative for coherence, for example?
Labels: babble, cogito, dialogism, Jacques, listening, personhood
Saturday, February 09, 2008
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
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Is repetition possible as an imitation of oneself? The question springs from an aside by Merleau-Ponty. Under the heading of "The Phenomenon of Imitation" Merleau-Ponty discusses the problem of the consciousness of other people, and relates this to certain facts of language acquisition (Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, pp. 31-53. Early on he says that "imitation of oneself (repetition) or of others is founded on something besides the representation of movements" (p. 33). If we assume that Merleau-Ponty is on track about the consciousness of others, as I intend to do for the nonce, though the problem may ultimately be intractable, then the problem of repetition may not be easily disentangled from the problem of other people. That is, even if it is assumed that repetition is possible as an automimesis, the question of the self's relation to self in repetition may remain rather opaque, which isn't to say that nothing at all can be said about it.
What is automimesis founded upon? At the outset we can reject the idea that the mimetic subject forms a representation of his own bodily movements and then recreates these in accordance with that representation. The critique is twofold: on the one hand the awareness of one's own corporeal abilities is nonrepresentative, if you will, precognitive; on the other hand it seems that what is aimed for in imitation is a goal or object of movement. Following Paul Guillaume's argument in Imitation in Children, Merleau-Ponty says that "imitation is founded on a community of goals, of objects" (p. 35). Yet this view of imitation is incomplete. From the analysis of affective imitiation, which is putatively just as precocious as the imitation of gestures, Merleau-Ponty concludes that imitation must also involve a "human component" besides an interest in the object alone (p. 39). In imitation the person is regarded as neither body nor mind, but as behavior (p. 35), which is interpreted as expression, as style. Style, Merleau-Ponty insists, is not an idea, but a manner that is apprehended in imitation (p. 43). We might say that what is grasped in imitation is a "melodic totality" (p. 40) of gesture and ability. Automimesis, we can say, is founded on the development of one's own style.
Is automimesis an accomplishment of the cogito, either in its inception, its process, or its conclusion? If automimesis were a capability of the cogito we would have to question at some point the originality of the cogito. It's doubtful whether the cogito can sustain such doubts. Yet if we take the view that automimesis begins with an apperceptive act that, following Husserl (Cartesian Meditations, § 50), is not a cognition, and that is enacted by a more primordial self, a tacit cogito perhaps, we still face the problem of the self's orginality. To phrase the problem in other terms, is there such an animal as an intersubjective self? What would its mineness mean?
It is precisely the sense of mineness that is unsettled in automimesis. I won't yet make the leap to say that repetition is possible only as difference because there is still something to be said about the unsettling of mineness. If repetition is possible on the basis of an intentional transgression, could it be that the mineness of experience is routinely, practically transgressed? Is there any sense of mineness that attaches to transgression, just to carry it through? Merleau-Ponty argues that the expression of what is most personal in experience is constantly being perfected, not just in children but in adults (p. 53). Can we separate the expression of mineness from mineness? Could it be that mineness is constantly under revision? Can we designate a basis upon which repetetion as automimesis is possible as the unsettled, or is that one step beyond transgression, a step we need to be cautious about taking? Say it exists as such. Is the unsettled situational, or is it more deeply personal? I don't really know how to answer that.
Labels: cogito, egology, Merleau-Ponty, repetition, transgression, uniqueness
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Professor Hung Wai-Shun's contribution to the Hong Kong PEACE conference is titled Perception and Self-Awareness in Merleau-Ponty: The Problem of the Tacit Cogito in the Phenomenology of Perception (pdf). Here is the absract:
If the legacy of Descartes is his idea of consciousness as a realm of interiority, the contributions of many twentieth-century philosophers consist precisely in their efforts to criticize this Cartesian notion of self. Among these efforts, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception occupies an ambiguous position. While its analysis of being-in-the-world as bodily insertion, of expression as incarnation of sense, and of the opaqueness of our inner life challenges the idea of consciousness as a realm of transparency and self-presence, its notion of a tacit cogito seems to remain a notion of self-presence. This essay attempts to understand Merleau-Ponty's concerns behind the notion of tacit cogito, and suggests that the notion is required in order to account for the self-awareness of every experience. Referring to Merleau-Ponty's self-criticism in The Visible and the Invisible, this essay suggests that the difficulties surrounding this notion come from both its conception of the pre-reflective relation of the self to itself as a kind of "proto-reflection" and its conception of the relation between reflection and the pre-reflective in terms of negativity. However, in the analysis of bodily self-awareness of the Phenomenology we can already find the gems of a notion of self-awareness that could avoid the pitfalls of the tacit cogito, and the essay concludes with a brief discussion of how this line of thought is picked up and developed in Merleau-Ponty's later work.
Though I would urge you to read Hung's paper in its entirity, I will say off the bat that I don't believe that the later train of Merleau-Ponty's thought as presented by Hung actually does avoid the pitfalls of the tacit cogito. I think this has to do with Merleau-Ponty's conviction that consciousness essentially has to do with language. So what is the tacit cogito? The tacit cogito is from the gitgo an impossibility. Starting with the notion that "[a]ll thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness" (Phenomenology of Percepetion, p. 371), Merleau-Ponty designates one's conscious presence to oneself as the tacit cogito, which he says is "no less than existence." But, he says, "[t]he tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself" (p. 404). Does this mean that the cogito is destined for language? I think that is what Merleau-Ponty is getting at, and, thus, I think this but makes his existential phenomenology a humanism. When Merleau-Ponty says "existence" or "life," as in "this ambiguous life" of the truly transcendental (pp. 364-365), he is talking about human existence, about human life. That self-awareness has been observed in dolphins, chimpanzees and elephants, or that semovience might point to a kind of self-awareness broadly shared within the Kingdom Animalia, these facts have nothing to do with the tacit cogito, nor with any kind of bodily awareness that the later Merleau-Ponty riffs on, because these instances of self-awareness are in no way tied to language. We could of course broaden our understanding of language to account for the reflective attitudes of our fellow animals. We might then need another idea of language or signification to account for what humans do. Or, if we want to insist on a single definition of language and a single definition of life, we could say that what Merleau-Ponty identifies as the tacit cogito really does point to something originary, and isn't necessarily destined for language.
Labels: cogito, Hung, Merleau-Ponty, self-awareness
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Marion sums up Heidegger's critique of the ego cogito:
There where the ego gives to be thought, or rather to make itself be thought (or even to make itself simple thought) without ever giving Being in a determinate and determining sense, Dasein gives Being by determining the way of Being of the other beings, because it itself, in advance and according to its privilege, determines itself to be according to its own way of Being. To be sure, the ego is, but it is without thinking about it, since it thinks only about thinking its thinkable things, whose respective ways of Being it does not establish any more than it is itself determinied in its own way of Being; in thinking itself as being only through and for the exercise of the cogitatio, it masks, through the epistemic evidence of its nevertheless ontologically loose existence, and then through the certitude of the other subsistent truths, the total absence of decision concerning the Being of beings, which are reduced to the level of pure and simple cogitata.
(Reduction and Givenness, p. 93)
Marion says "the total absence of decision concerning the Being of beings" like that's a bad thing. I'm yet to be convinced. The real crux of the issue is how or whether the ego cogito thinks about its own existence. It's obviously not unthinkable fullstop. How is it unthinkable then for the ego cogito? Or why would the thinking of its existence not be a cogitatum?
Labels: cogito, Descartes, Heidegger, Marion, phenomenology
Friday, December 08, 2006
Under the heading "Thought tends to personal form" William James offers the following insight (from Principles of Psychology: Chapter IX, The Stream of Thought):
The universal conscious fact is not "feelings and thoughts exist," but "I think" and "I feel." No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth.
By personal selves, James means "organized selves with a memory, habits, and sense of their own identity" To Dylan Trigg's question, Does the cogito remember?, I would add, "Is the cogito a creature of habit?" This seems to have been my obsession lately, but it's not bringing me any closer to understanding the connection between frequency and thinking.
Another tack then: Does the cogito have rhythm? More simply there's the question of whether the cogito has a pulse. But I don't think it's that simple. I don't have reason to believe that thinking is any less complex than elementary forms of musicality. If I say the cogito has rhythm, I mean that it has an on again, off again relation to pulse, that it builds on pulse. And the pulse is what? The cycle of day and night, the beat of the heart, the pulsative function of the unconscious, repetition.... Any experienced duration becomes rhythmicized by the cogito, including, perhaps primarily, its own durations.
Can we separate the experiential from what thought accomplishes on its own, or is this question of how exactly thinking recurs necessarily a question of the experience of thinking?
Am I afraid of thinking? Afraid to allow for what its recurrence might mean? What would it be like to have a completely tychistic personality? Or to be a person completely open to the event of thinking at each and every moment? I have a sense of myself as sensible, as a person who sleeps at night and during the day thinks about things now and then. I also have memories of thinking as lucubration, as manic, intense and incessant. If thought could go on without a person attached to it, would it ever want to rest? Would it be afraid to? These are questions of personality.
Labels: cogito, experience, habit, James, pulsative function, rhythm
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Dylan Trigg's latest post (Night of the Il y a) prompted me to look at Descartes' Meditations to see about the question of whether the cogito sleeps. Decartes makes a leitmotif of the experience of sleep, in particular dreaming. Rumor has it that Descartes was himself a prodigious sleeper, but the question of whether the cogito sleeps arises almost of its own from the nature of Descartes' discovery.
In the First Meditation, Of the Things We May Doubt, Descartes says that "there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep." This really bugs him, and by the Sixth Meditation, Of the Existence of Material Things, and on the Real Distinction between the Mind and Body of Man, he comes to the view that: "I ought to reject all the doubts of those bygone days, as hyperbolical and ridiculous, especially the general uncertainty respecting sleep, which I could not distinguish from the waking state: for I now find a very marked difference between the two states, in respect that our memory can never connect our dreams with each other and with the course of life, in the way it is in the habit of doing with events that occur when we are awake." Personally I don't find this persuasive. I find that my memory can connect my dreams to each other and to the course of my life. In the same way as with waking events? That I don't know. In any case, Descartes' argument here does say something interesting about the cogito, namely that it has a course of life.
Is Descartes' a thing who thinks, as in the Second Meditation, or is he a man in the habit of sleeping, as he admits to being in the First Mediation? I don't see that this distinction between the habitual sleeper and the thinker is adequately resolved by Descartes. His anxiety about the interruption of the stream of consciousness is revealing, and the fact that he associates this phenomenon of the stream of consciousness with the course of life shows his bias. Do we have here the beginnings of a phenomenology of insomnia? Does the cogito sleep?
Labels: cogito, Descartes, insomnia, sleep