Fido the Yak

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

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

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

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

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:03 AM. 0 comments

László Tengelyi, whose The Wild Region in Life History I have yet to read (see this review by Daniel Dahlstrom), has kindly put some of his papers online, including Experience, Action, and Narration (pdf). Here are his conclusions:

We may sum up the considerations presented in this paper by formulating some theses. First, it may be held that it is solely experience which is grasped by, and expressed in, narratives. However, it must be added, secondly, that experience can never be exhausted by stories expressly narrated; it always involves some shreds of sense that may be said to wait for being recounted without exhibiting, or even fitting in well with, the explicit structure of narratives. The perception of these inchoative sense-moments may encourage us to embrace Ricoeur's idea of a pre-narrative structure of experience. But it is with caution that this notion is to be made use of. For nothing prevents discarded, or even repressed, sense-arousals from transcending the narratives which are, in each case, designed to capture them. That is precisely why, thirdly, they may be supposed to prepare unprecedented actions which put into question the stories accepted as characteristic of one's life and of one's self. Such a conflict between actions and narratives may, fourthly, be said to lead to a crisis in which an unavoidable split of the self comes to the fore and becomes manifest. It must, fifthly, be emphasized, however, that this split of the self does not inevitably degenerate into a pathological phenomenon because it is normally counter-balanced by a dynamic equilibrium inhering in experience, which, from time to time, re-arranges and re-organizes the relationship between acting and recounting. Thus, it is experience that mediates between the two attitudes the self is divided into.

(p. 16)

Tengelyi's conclusions rest on a certain notion of experience, and some interesting thinking about the relationship between experience and reality. To begin with, Tengelyi challenges a Husserlian conviction that experience is the product of a consciousness that bestows sense upon the objects of experience. If we are not going to adopt the naive empiricist position that objects identify themselves as real, how then are we to understand the connection between experience and reality? There is room here for a radical phenomenology of perception such as Barbaras has embarked upon; however, that's not the path that Tengelyi follows. Though he seeks to break the bond between transcendental idealism and phenomenology, Tengelyi retains the idea that the relationship between experience and reality can only be conceived from the perspective of one's own consciousness. He borrows from Fichte, Hegel and Schelling a notion that something in experience occurs behind the back of consciousness, so to speak, which is designated as the in itself. He sees an insight here that can be applied without the "mythology" of an unconscious. His claim is that "all experience is the experience of the in itself. It is sufficient for this claim to conceive of experience as of an event that thwarts previous expectations, frustrates conceptual identifications and calls for modifying conceptual schemes. Thus interpreted, experience makes it evident that sense-bestowal by consciousness is from time to time shattered, put into question and urged to renew itself by impulses coming, so to speak, from outside the conscious life" (p. 4). Sense, in Tengelyi's view, is not so much bestowed by consciousness as it is processed by experience. The whole idea of reality has to do with the fact that refutation and confirmation go hand in hand in experience . All experience is an encounter with a mind-independent reality, though, it must be said, the lessons of this encounter are necessarily interpreted from the perspective of a consciousness. (p. 5).

Is it time to go "hmm"? Well, there's one more idea to explore. If we're not talking about a dubious notion of the unconcsious, how do we account for the behind the back of consciousness quality of the in itself? Tengelyi proposes a genetic analysis of experience as opposed to a static analysis, an approach that would acknowledge, if I read him correctly, Erfarhungen rather than Erlebnisse ("lived experiences") (p. 6). What he notices is that in moving from one intentional experience to another, there are shreds of sense left in the wake, in the transition between experiences. He calls these shreds of sense "inter-intentional moments of spontaneous sense-formation," and these moments correspond to a behind the back of consciousness (p. 7). Now I will go "hmm."

My readings in European philosophy have taught me that idealism is deeply unpopular, and that consciousness is regarded with suspicion. I'm not sure why I, as a reader, should adopt these same beliefs and attitudes. I think there is an opinion that consciousness does not account for everything that thinking ought to account for, and this leads to a search for other concepts, and a broadening of concepts like meaning (which we see in Husserl, btw), or experience. The notion that consciousness should be broadened looks like a dead end to many European thinkers. So that's why I go "hmm."

Labels: egology, experience, meaning, narrative, Tengelyi, the unconscious

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:39 PM. 0 comments

Deleuze says:

Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative; rather it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question. Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference: heteron, not enantion. For this reason non-being should rather be written (non)-being or, better still, ?-being.

(Difference and Repetition, p. 64, emphasis Deleuze's)

Deleuze himself opts for "(non)-being" instead of "?-being" right through to his conclusions. This is precisely ironic ("Irony consists in treating things and beings as so many responses to hidden questions, so many cases for problems yet to be resolved," p. 63), pointedly so given that Deleuze faults Heidegger for encouraging misunderstandings by his treatment of nothingness (p. 66).

Deleuze's reading of Heidegger deserves special notice. He says, "Ontological Difference corresponds to questioning. It is the being of questions, which become problems, marking out the determinant fields of existence" (p.65). I hadn't quite thought of ontological difference that way, though it does have the ring of the familiar. This leads me to ask some questions of my own.

One set of questions concerns the nature of Deleuze's discourse on difference. I wonder whether, ironically, Deleuze isn't pursuing an idealism. This idealism would have to be understood as radically divergent from Plato's idealism, which Deleuze seeks to overturn. Deleuze says that "the difficulty facing everything is to become its own simulacrum, to attain the status of a sign in the coherence of the eternal return" (p. 67). For Deleuze, simulacra are not less real than the things themselves, so to speak; rather, they point to "the lived reality of a sub-representative domain" (p.69). Ideas are not grounding in Deleuze's thinking. However, the question of how we relate to the real involves a semiotics that covers much the same ground as an idealism by passing through a terrain of consciousness for whom things are real or, more fundamentally, for whom things are so many problems and questions. The ground that isn't covered is the domain of representation. The question for me is, if we allow for Deleuze's overturning of representation, are we still left with something like a world of ideas, or a world of ideation?

This brings me to another set of questions concerning the horizon of questioning, which may also be thought of as the horizon of difficulty. Who or what occupies this horizon? Deleuze thinks that the cogito is a stupidity. He says:

The subject of the Cartesian Cogito does not think: it only has the possibility of thinking, and remains stupid at the heart of that possibility. It lacks the form of the determinable: not a specificity, not a specific form informing a matter, not a memory informing a present, but the pure and empty form of time. It is the empty form of time which introduces and constitutes Difference in thought, on the basis of which it thinks, in the form of the difference between the indeterminate and determination. It is this form of thought which distributes throughout itself an I fractured by the abstract line, a passive self produced by a groundlessness that it contemplates. It is this which engenders thought within thought, for thought thinks only by means of difference, around this point of ungrounding.

(p. 276)

There is room in Deleuze's philosophy for a (fractured) subject who thinks, indeed a demand for it, while more primordially there is repetition and difference, a being-in-question and its conduct. Is it possible to ask in Deleuze's philosophy who this being-in-qeustion really is? Does (non)-being here stand for the guy behind the guy behind the guy? And is this the reason why Deleuze prefers to say "(non)-being" instead of "?-being"?.

Labels: Deleuze, egology, Heidegger, ontology

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:09 AM. 8 comments

Marion argues that the I feel is more originary than the I think (Being Given, pp. 249-251) and in this way his idea of the witness to the paradox will explain the givenness of the subject–not the I think, but rather the givenness of the me, the I feel, for this splitting of the subject brings Marion to say that "what exercizes the transcendental function can never and should never give itself" (p. 256). Marion's reasoning on this point is not perfectly clear to me. It is clear to me that for Marion the problem with the I think is that it forces the subject to appear in the same mode as objects. For me the problem with Marion's solution is to imagine a subject whose givenness flows from phenomenality without there already having been given a subject capable of experience.

Labels: egology, Marion, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:56 AM. 5 comments

Marion says:

The musical offering offers first the very movement of its coming forward–it offers the effect of its very offering, without or beyond the sounds that it produces. Let me name this phenomenological extremity where the coming forward exceeds what comes forward a paradox

(Being Given, p. 216, emphasis Marion's).

For the moment let's overlook what is obviously paradoxical here (music without sounds) and see what Marion has to say about the paradox. I quote him at length because this very long paragraph sums up his thinking and touches on (without resolving) what I feel are the central problems in Marion's account of givenness.

The paradox not only suspends the phenomenon's subjection to the I; it inverts it. For, far from being able to constitute this phenomenon, the I experiences itself as constituted by it. To the constituting subject, there succeeds the witnes–the constituted witness. Constituted witness, the subject is still the worker of truth, but he cannot claim to be its producer. With the name witness, we must understand a subjectivity stripped of the characteristics that give it transcendental rank. (i) Constituted and no longer constituting, the witness no longer enacts synthesis or constitution. Or rather, synthesis becomes passive and is imposed on it. As with constitution, the giving of meaning (Sinngebung) is inverted. The I can no longer provide its meaning to lived experiences and intuition; rather the latter give themselves and therefore give it their meaning (a meaning that is for that matter partial and no longer all-encompassing). (ii) That is, in the case of a saturated phenomenon, intuition by definition passes beyond what meaning a hermeneutic of the concept can provide, a fortiori a hermeneutic practiced by the finite I, which will always have less givable meaning (concept, intentionality, signification, noesis, etc.) than the intuitive given calls for. (iii) The inversion of the gaze, and therefore of the guard it mounts over the object, places the I, become witness, under the guard of the paradox (saturated phenomenon) that controls it and stands vigilant over it. For the witness cannot avail himself of a viewpoint that dominates the intuition which submerges him. In space, the saturated phenomenon swallows him with its intuitive deluge; in time, it precedes him with an always already there interpretation. The I loses its anteriority as egoic pole (polar I) and cannot yet identify itself, except by admitting the precedence of such an unconstitutable phenomenon. This reveresal leaves him stupefied and taken aback, essentially surprised by the more original event, which takes him away from himself. (iv) The witness is therefore opposed to the I in that he no longer has the initiative in manifestation (by facticity), does not see the given phenomenon in its totality (by excess of intuition), cannot read or interpret the intuitive excess (by shortage of concept), and finally lets himself be judged (said, determined) by what he himself cannot say or think adequately. In this way, the phenomenon is no longer reduced to the I who would gaze at it. Irregardable, he confesses himself irreducible. The event that comes up can no longer be constituted into an object; in contrast, it leaves the durable trace of its enclosure only in the I/me, witness constituted despite itself by what it receives. In short, the witness succeeds the I by renouncing the first person, or rather the nominative of this first role. In this witness, we should hear less the eloquent or heroic testator to an event that he reports, conveys, and defends–assuming again therefore a (re-)production of the phenomenon–and more the simple, luminous witness: he lights up as on a control panel at the very instant when and each time the information he should render phenomenal (in this case, the visible) arrives to him from a transistor by electric impulse without initiative or delay. Here the witness himself is not invested in the phenomenon, nor does he invest with it . . .; rather, he finds himself so invested, submerged, that he can only register it immediately

(pp. 216-218, emphasis Marion's).

Marion's paradox adds a wrinkle to the problem of the givenness of the I: it might not be prior to the givenness of the phenomenon, or prior to the me in the case of the paradox, the excessive phenomenon. I don't think this really solves the problem of the I's non appearance, which is a problem to the extent that Marion equates giving and showing. And it's not nearly a complete reckoning of the givenness of the I. Allowing these doubts to sit off to the side for a second, I'm still not sure that Marion's witness resembles anybody I know.

Labels: egology, Marion, music, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:15 PM. 1 comments

The equivalence between showing itself and giving itself is not a mere opinion according to Marion, but a "theoretical necessity" (p. 119). However, there is something that may be said to be given without appearing which Marion is not thinking at this point: the I. If one were to accept whole hog the argument in Reduction and Givenness that nothingness, which may stand in for the nonbeing of the I, appears in the existential mood of profound boredom, would this nullify the argument that I is given without appearing? In my mind this is far from settled.

Following Husserl ("Individual Being of every sort is, quite universally speaking, 'contingent' [zulfällig]," Ideas, § 2, translation modified by Marion's translator, Kosky), Marion elaborates three modes of the contigency of the phenomenon. Is is possible that the I appears in any of these modalities? First it will be useful to clarify what Marion means by contingency. He says:

Before meaning the mere opposite of the necessary, contingent says what touches me, what reaches me and therefore arrives to me (according to the Latin) or (according to the German) what "falls like that," therefore "falls upon me from above." The phenomenon appears to the degree to which first it goes, pushes, and extends as far as me (it becomes contiguous with me; it enters into contact with me) so as to then affect me (act on me, modify me). No phenomenon can appear without coming upon me, arriving to me, affecting me as an event that modifies my field (of vision, of knowledge, of life, it matters little here).

(Being Given, p. 125)

It seems that I (at least as me) will have to be a necessity rather than a contingency, notwithstanding Marion's objections to this kind of argument. Nevertheless, I will review Marion's three modes of contingency to see whether the I might be able to slip in as a contingency. Of the three modes of contingency, Marion says, "These three characteristics (arriving, for the known and subsistent object; coming upon me, for manipulable equipment; imposing itself on me, for habitual phenomena) define, schematically at least, the contingency of what appears insofar as it touches me" (p. 130). It's possible, I think, for the I to appear in any of these modes, but at the same time the I must already be there, as far as me, so to speak. It must be first given.

Still, might the I be essentially given in any of these modes of contingency? Of the three, the mode that pertains to habitual phenomena seems like the most interesting possibility. This can't really be consistent with Marion's analysis. Speaking of habitual phenomena, phenomena that impose themsleves upon me, Marion says:

These phenomena... share one exceptional property: I no longer remain simply outside them, as if faced with what is an object to me, at the distance of intentionality and manipulation; rather, they happen to me or arrive over me like what successively shelters me, embraces me, and distracts me–in short, imposes on me. I can enter and yield to them or withdraw and exit them; but in all cases I must inhabit them or (what amounts to the same thing) be exiled. On principle, I must habituate myself to them. I call these phenomena habitual phenomena. Habit does not mean that they function longer than the others (some of them are signalled by their brevity and incessant changing), but essentially that we must habituate ourselves to them. Habituating ourselves to them sometimes implies taking the time to accustom ourselves to them (thus renouncing having ourselves make them) and always finding the right attitude, the correct disposition, the hexis or the habitus that helps resist them, behave in relation to them, use them, eventually understand them.

(p. 130, emphasis Marion's)

If the I is not something already given prior to its being able to be given as phenomenon, is it then not precisely something that we come to inhabit (or, alternatively, come to be exiled from)? To be clear, this is not the reading Marion suggests. (I will keep you posted on how he finally comes to talk about the givenness of the I.) It's problematical because it's hard to think how the I could happen to me without my having already been there to begin with. The other alternative, however, is to admit that the I is not given as a phenomenon, and therefore Marion is incorrect to claim that giving itself and showing itself are equivalent. It's difficult, therefore, not to read Marion against Marion on this point.

Update. Marion does come out and say, following Husserl, that "Only the consciousness-region of the I makes an exception to contingency" (pp. 137-138). It must be concluded therefore, without doubt, that in Marion's analysis the I neither shows itself nor gives itself. Yet Marion will ask, "What would become of the subject if he were determined only according to givenness?" (p. 188). Hmm.

Labels: egology, habit, Marion, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:42 PM. 1 comments

Henry asks, "Can the problem of alientation in fact be posited otherwise than in a philosophy of the first person? Is there any meaning whatever in saying that a stone is alienated?" (Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 146). This has the makings of a paradox. Can the first person, strictly speaking, be alienated? Isn't that exactly the meaning of alienation, to be at once like a person and like a stone?

What exactly is the philosophical problem with switching voices? We do this all the time in our everyday speech, in inner speech as well as verbal discourse. For a phenomenologist like Henry, the problem is in moving from the certainty of the "I think" to the dubiousness of the existence of other entities. Would he say that it is philosophically wrong to reach an accomodation with dubiousness? What kind of life would that be, a life without dubiousness?

In this passage on alienation, Henry is at odds with the Freudian unconscious. Elsewhere he says that "the task of philosophy is not to denounce illusions but rather to justify them, at least by making apparent the foundation which makes them possible and the ontological structure from which they develop" (p. 115). I don't think Henry has made it his task to justify the unconscious, which he regards as illusory. I like phenomenology precisely because all of its realities are apparent, but I often wonder whether this is the whole story.

Labels: egology, Henry, phenomenology, the unconscious

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:43 AM. 0 comments

Henry says that the immanent body and the transcendent body both have the quality of being mine (Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, p. 115). He's obviously overlooking the possibility of being inhabited by a demon ego. When I reflect upon myself, how do I know that the mine that reflects and the mine that is reflected upon are in fact the same mine? If they are mine in different ways, which feels at least plausible, then I wonder about the possibility of at least one instance of mine not being properly and truly mine. Could my transcendent being belong to someone else? Or what if its my immanent being that really isn't mine? How horrible.

I'm joking of course, but there is a serious issue here. Henry says, "Because our objective body is only a representation of our original body, the problems which the duality of these two bodies poses and the unity of meaning which unites them are altogether analogous to the problems which stem from the relationships between the transcendent ego and the absolute ego" (p. 133). Pace Henry, and without the benefit of having read his Essence of Manifestation, this unity can be doubted, by the same stroke that separates the transcendent from the absolute egos, which, although essential to phenomenology, seems to have created a problem that wasn't there to begin with in the phenomenon of the ego. Or was it? Who exactly is the ego that can reflect upon himself?

Update. In a footnote to his Conclusion Herny says, "the objective transcendent body which we continually designate as 'ours', can obviously be that of another ego, which is what takes place in normal erotic life" (p. 216). Hmm.

Labels: egology, Henry, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 4:37 PM. 2 comments

I am abidingly the yak who thus and so yakked. There's no getting around it. But in what way am I the yak who wandered here and there? Abidingly? I used to imagine that the interesting thing about the nomadic way of life was transhumance. Now I'm not so sure. Still, I should not be surprised if, ultimately, there is no place for nomadism in any worldly egology. And yet what would life be like without wandering? I shudder to think.

Can newborn infants experience non-organization, a lack of relatedness between experiences? Stern replies emphatically in the negative (The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 46). The state of relative undifferentiation should not be hypostatized. When diverse experiences are in some way yoked, the infant can experience the emergence of organization. What then becomes of wandering? Is wandering the perpetual emergence of organization, or is it something more radically at a distance from the self?

Stern presents a four dimensional model of the infant self: emergent self, core self, subjective self, and verbal self. The model has two plain virtues: (1) it appears to be empirically warranted, and (2) the development of one sense of self does not obliterate the previously attained senses of self; all are available to experience throughout the course of life. In theory one should be able to introspectively identify one's emergent sense of self. So what about non-self? Is this available to introspection? Search me.

Labels: egology, introspection, Stern, wandering

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:19 PM. 0 comments