Friday, July 11, 2008
Antonio Calcagno's critique of Henry's phenomenology would be a must-read if only for his position that life "must be understood as an a posteriori abstraction drawn from my natural experiences of myself dwelling in the world" ("Michel Henry's Non-Intentionality Thesis and Husserlian Phenomenology," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 39, No. 2, May 2008, p. 125). Should we question the attitude that tells us which experiences are natural and which might possibly not be? Anyway, as part of my ongoing struggle with the idea of transcendence, I admit I am unsure about what to make of a parcelling out of ideas into transcendence on the one side and experience (the empirical) on the other. More abstractly my concern may well be with priority (which I am thoroughly comfortable calling it into question) or, even more abstractly, narrativity. Why should the truth of experience be anything like a narrative–and by "truth of experience" I probably mean anything I should want to say about it? Surely there is more to saying than narrative, and, without denying narration its due, I object to all attempts to limit the saying of experience to narration. Well, Calcagno apparently has Henry's number, and his passing of the question of life through subjectivity and intersubjectivity as an ethical matter (he sometimes reads Husserl through Stein, as might be expected) merits our admiration, but I'm going to set all that aside for a moment to think about givenness, with Calcagno's guidance, and what may or may not be an ontological difference prior, perhaps, to any phenomenology.
Husserl does give an account of what is prior and what is conditional for phenomenology to operate successfully by admitting that there is a givenness not only about things as they appear to consciousness but also a givenness about consciousness itself. Edith Stein describes the givenness of consciousness as a Komplexbildung that consists of continually given lived-experiences. Husserl does not give a complete and systematic phenomenology of givenness not because his project is incomplete, but more because he realizes that there are certain realities that cannot be accounted for. In this way, Husserlian givenness must be understood as a first principle that admits a gap. We start there, but as with any principle, we cannot give a full account of its status without undermining its foundational properties. Givenness is a starting point, and the limits of human understanding cannot speculate as to why or how it comes to be operates. Any attempt to give an account of givenness other than as first principle is to lapse into a realm that transcends human understanding, namely, speculative metaphysics or theology.
(p. 118, my bold)
Would it be possible to lapse into an empirically reachable reality from the breach (while remaining ambivalent about the precise timing of the admittance of ἀρχαί)? Does the breach elapse? I don't see why we shouldn't continue to investigate its extensivity, which might perhaps be the substrate of a lapse.
A question about the fictility of existence: does a Komplexbildung have a narrative beginning, or anything like a narrative structure?
Oh, if we say Komplexbildung floats on indeterminacy what have we added to the discussion? In one aspect indeterminacy is the soul of gifting, but I would be wary of making of it a first principle.
For Hagège the word is the ἀρχή of exchange. Is he wrong? Not only is he not wrong in any absolute sense (we could never rule it out), he could almost be talking about the breach. Exchange, or gifting, is the manner of the breach's lapse into the reachable.
We offer the breach up for exchange. Have we ever expected so much of extension? Enough to surprise?
What first principle would a Bildung admit and still remain something like a formation; what happens to Bildung im Bildungsgang without which it would never happen at all? Habitation?
Does sequence describe anything real? Perhaps, or perhaps it aids in our descriptions, but we should be wary of thinking gifting can be adequately described without attending to its rhythms, and, while temporally patterned (in other words amenable to descriptions in terms of sequences), rhythms, as patterns, may yet disrupt the idea of firstness, or mosdef firstness as foundational. A Komplexbildung of polysequentialities, one consistent with the burst of the synkairotic, though it may indeed be a fact of life, has yet to be imagined.
A difference between the breach and the ἀρχή: the ἀρχή opens by closure; the breach is perpetually open to disruption; it can't properly be undermined because the habitation it inaugurates (as if every month were August) is not founded but rather found, a habitation amid and betwixt the open.
At the risk of becoming tiresome, my position is that we lapse into storytelling–a move towards particular human understandings rather than the be all and end all of understanding–by starting with the ἀρχή. Once we identify that lapse, it becomes difficult to say that the lapse and (or on account of) its logic, namely narrative, didn't in fact precede the ἀρχή, which is of course a contradiction of any claim to firstness, or at best a paradox of priority (that it would pose there being a division into priority and posteriority prior to any emergence of the prior). So in posing the breach as an alternative to the ἀρχή we open narration to questioning by setting aside priority. We want to know if the breach lapses into anything knowable. We want to know if the breach elapses at all. My sense is that it does, but we limit ourselves by allowing narrative or priority as a narrative trope to dominate our apprehensions of its elapsing. We may then have been mistaken in equating the logic of the lapse with narrative generally, although in particular lapses from ἀρχαί may occur according to a logic of narration. When I call a step "preliminary" or "inaugurating" I don't mean to embark on a foundational discourse. (The step is another way of saying lapse, what is admitted to by the breach.) If this commits me in some measure to narrative, it doesn't prevent me, I think, from lapsing. Instead of telling the story of a givenness (e.g. ontological difference), we might rather be in touch with a gifting. The breach is that being in touch.
Labels: Anaximander, Calcagno, Claude Hagège, gift, givenness, Henry, Husserl, ontological difference, Stein, Thales
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Saying that people exist is almost like attributing a quality to them. It modifies existence, metasemantically, so to speak, which is how existence can come to be something like a quality. People exist suggests that existence is a potential which may or may not be activated, when in fact existence probably has an altogether different relation to activity. For some philosophical purposes, then, it would be better to say that existence peoples.
Perhaps it is only through its peopling that we can understand that existence peoples. That is, we may credit an existence that peoples with an anthropomorphism which we would ordinarily regard as our own, and this is how we begin to grasp its agency, such as it may be. This would be our limitation provided to us by existence, this anthropomorphism. But is this really the right word, anthropomorphism? Are people given as forms, or through forms? By saying that existence peoples aren't we attempting to say something like people are given through or as an activity of existence? Where do forms come in?
We might say that existence peoples epigenetically, in a movement from the amorphous, an emergence. Is the amorphous ever really shaken off by the living? Is a living form ever full?
We might also say that existence peoples phylogenetically, as it lives. Are we existents left to recapitulate, to inhabit forms handed down to us, or do we give epigenesis some fuller meaning, something even approaching transcendence? What is this living we are passing through?
We should reflect on transitivity, the through. Does it go to far to attribute agency to existence when all that we have said is that existence peoples? Who or what does existence people? What would be capable of being peopled? You? Me? Is the peopling of existence in fact reflexive? Does it pass through you and me only on its way to peopling itself? In that case would it be a proper it?
It must somehow be an error to think a pluralism of pluralities, to think existences as Existences. Consider these alternatives: existences people existences, existences people peoples; or, existence peoples existence, existence peoples people. Surely we are talking about *existence, a topic of conversation rather than existences themselves. Do we surrender to conversation? Is that a limitation provided to us by (*)existence? And yet, how do I presume to talk sensibly about the nonexistence of existence (in the singular)?
I see chaoses and things and people. Obviously existences have many modalities. Could existence be one of those modalities? Do existences single out?
What kind of relation is there between peopling and singling out? I venture to say it is a wild relation. There would be nothing necessary or essential about it. One thing I mean by saying that I do in fact see chaoses is that many if not most relations are wild relations, and sense bestowal is both limiting and limited. At the limits of sense bestowal existence peoples.
Whose limits are the limits of sense bestowal?
Sometimes I feel as if existence didn't people for me or through me or anyhow about me.
One can only commit to a personal philosophy. It doesn't come naturally, without reserve, without doubts. Do you suppose that existence is committed to you? I suppose you are committed to existence, but reasons for commitment are opaque to me. Does existence reciprocate commitments? Does existence people in order to reciprocate? Somehow I feel that would be a backwards reading, as if reciprocity were an accident of peopling. And commitment too were an accident.
Accidents happen at the limits of sense bestowal. We can only own them by an accident, or by a series of accidents: that existence peoples, that people reciprocate, that people commit. One can only commit to being given a gift, that is, to be given a gift one must give oneself to being with being given a gift, one must give oneself with giving. Is that asking too much of people? On the contrary, would it be asking too much for people to own commitment just like that without cause or reason, as if they were taking commitment from existence without acknowledging its having been given to them as people? (Yeah, yeah, the gift requires just such a taking.) Possibly many of your commitments will be met with ingratitude. People can be rough that way.
Labels: existence, gift, humans
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Marion asks, "Why not suppose that the gift–therefore exchange, the circulation of the given between giver and givee, return and response, loss and gain–can, once purified of its empirical blossoming, provide at least the outline of a noncausal, nonefficient, and finally nonmetaphysical model of givenness?" (p. 74). This seems like an interesting path to follow (without forgetting, although Marion appears not to recognize it, that it was Marion himself who saw in givenness an effect and therefore introduced the problem of causality in the first place).
Marion's purification of the gift is quite radical. He brackets out the giver, the givee, and the object given. Only this latter bracketing appears to be pretty straightforward. The bracketing of the giver takes place from the perspective of the givee, while the bracketing of the givee takes place from the perspective of the giver. It doesn't seem possible to me that both could be bracketed at once. I would conclude therefore that reciprocity is an issue for the phenomenology of the gift. Marion, however, sees this view as reflecting the natural attitude. Because he has bracketed out both the giver and the givee, he believes that reciprocity does not belong to the essence of the gift. "The gift is twice opposed to exchange," he writes (p. 113). "It excludes the reciprocity that the other demands. It is accomplished perfectly with the disappearance of one of its extremes (giver or givee), without which the other would become obsolete." I will leave it for other readers to decide how perfectly the gift is accomplished in the absence of either the giver or the givee. The problem is that Marion cannot accomplish both of his reductions without a certain reciprocity of viewpoints.
So why then, finally, does Marion view the gift as antithetical to the economy of exchange? Is it really in the nature of the gift not to be subject to reciprocities, which would render the gift impossible in Marion's reading? Or is it a question of prejudice against the economy of exchange that, however well buttressed by rational arguments, doesn't pertain to the phenomenon of the gift itself?
Labels: gift, Marion, phenomenology