Friday, May 22, 2009
Shahar blogs (naturally in a post one ought to read a few times in its entirety):
Levinas equates the Saying (to be opposed to the Said) with the immanence of the body, with the diachrony of ageing and pain, and with the sensibility of flesh. In contrast to structuralism, which synchronizes the relations between signs in an atemporal horizontal totality, Levinas posits the primordial relation with the other. In this instance, signs are given as gifts between interlocutors before they are fixed into impersonal structures. Time de-phases the identical.
My recent use of somebody's idea of the "unsaid" is similar to the Saying in that it points to the performance of the said, its illocutionary residue; its particular bias is textualist as well as dialectical. Levinas' formulation holds more promise.
Time de-phases the identical. Dephasis problematizes temporality, as if temporality could persist while Time (time's identity) passed underground, even beneath phenomenality, phasis, delivery. A model for this temporality is the gift economy, if only because it's already been described. Now, do we say Time, its reality bracketed out for the sake of exploring the problem of dephasis, neither phases in nor phases out the identical, its presupposition it would seem, but precisely deprives it of phase? Interlocution as the relation that absolves of the relation? We can use totality to undo totality at the "same time" we step outside it? Is this approach suggested by an inherited style of reflection, or perhaps guided by an eidos of reflection? Has structuralism justly been given a due?
I'm sure Kevin would have something to say about this dephasing of the identical, as evidenced by his commentary here. "The music of engagement is always richer than this." (I don't mean to deflect. Just curious.)
Labels: givenness, kvond, Levinas, pragmatics, Shahar Ozeri, temporality, the same
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
Sunday, October 14, 2007
I became distracted while reading Patočka's review of Husserl's ideas on the grounding of experience in ideas. The distraction concerns an example of a material or content eidos. It is claimed that the eidetic singularity note C has as its highest region the "acoustic as such" (Introduction, p. 74). However, possibly the note C is regionless, i.e., the "region" of middle C is vibration as such, which is not a region but the universe itself. Hazrat Inayat Khan says:
If the whole creation can be well explained, it is by the phases of sound or vibration, which have manifested in different grades in all their various forms in life. Objects and names and forms are but the expression of vibrations in different aspects. Even all that we call matter or substance, and all that does not seem to speak or sound–it is all in reality vibration.
(The Mysticism of Sound and Music, p. 18)
A bygone generation of anthropologists spoke of founding myths. Another generation spoke of key symbols and dominant metaphors. An ethnography of free thinkers remains virtually unimaginable, an ethnography of philosphers much less so. A musicology of philosophic vibrations can perhaps also be imagined. However intriguing such projects might be, it is doubtful that philosophers would agree to accept any grounding from outside their discipline. So I am critical of the attempt to ground fields of knowledge in anything outside of their own universes of meaning. I guess I believe that not everything can be known. At the same time I am not committed to the philosophies of utter groundlessness. I'm merely taking notes.
Having been distracted, I now return to Patočka's critique of Husserl's attempt to ground experience in the eidetic. Patočka accepts the idea of an eidos but draws some different conclusions. I quote a passage at length because it touches on several themes I've been reading about over the past year.
The grounding of experience in its facticity is not the same as grounding it in its contingency. This grounding in facticity does not proceed within the immanent realm of thoughts and imaginations but rather represents thought transcending its immanent domain, beyond the contents that are subject to our free variation together with the emphasis on what is coextensive. In such grounding, thought aspires to the means with whose aid it can move even beyond its most immanent domain. The point here is to think the radically other, the different, and yet not make it a mere matter of thought. The object must not become a mere object of imagination and thought, and yet it must be thought. In this sense, the relation of mind to facticity is not merely the relation of the necessary to the contingent within which the necessary is contained as one of its possibilities.
Perhaps we need to think the relation to fact most of all inversely as well: it is fact as such, in its radical irreducibility to the universal of whatever content, that presents the mind with the stimulus and opportunity to unfold its factual freedom of breaking free of mere givenness as such. This factical freedom, the possibility of not being content with present givenness, of not being bound to it, then unfolds in the activity of comparison, into the access to ideas, in the "constitution" of idealities which in reality are always bound to their factical foundation.
That is, this detachment from the given always presupposes the given and can never be so complete that it could fly over it and get an overview of all its structures and concealments. We are not reaching the material from which worlds are formed, the possibilities from which a creator selects, but rather are freeing ourselves from the particular for its cohesion, its unity, its coherence; we construe and project the nongiven on the basis of the given.
(pp. 84-85, Patočka's emphasis)
Labels: givenness, ground, Husserl, Inayat Khan, Patočka, transcendence
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Kojima's critical Buberism (Monad and Thou, Section IV) fails to consider an obvious counterpoint. If I am unable to encounter you immediately in your entirety, as Kojima maintains, it isn't because there must be some structure or mechanism of mediation between us; rather, the problem lies with believing that entirety has anything to do with you or me. If you are not given in your entirety because entirety doesn't pertain to you, then neither are you given partially. The idea of partial givenness, by which Buber characterizes relations to the third person, cannot characterize your giveness in any mode if you are not a whole that can be parceled out. This is a slightly different question than whether you can be given indirectly.
Are you given to me–or is it us to whom you are given–in adumbrations? There is a problem here in the tendency to think that there must be a you yourself behind your givenness. We don't need to make that leap. We can say instead that you are your adumbrating, and we can recognize your being your adumbrating because your givenness is structured according to a horizon. You are in fact given to me in a unique horizon of our encounter, in which we acts as a so to speak invisible dimension. A strict Buberism would dismiss this approach as thinking my relation to you as being of the same kind as my relation to things that appear. I don't think this is quite true, because our horizon makes all the difference.
Now Kojima and I both agree, I think, that you don't become it, and it doesn't become you. Buber's formula, "'It' is a pupa, Thou is a butterfly," is a little off. You become you, just as I become me, we become us, he becomes him and so on. When I considered Deleuze's metaphor of the larval subject, I suggested marking a difference between endless becoming and perpetual becoming. I'm not sure I would stand by that, but if I do for the sake of argument, then it might follow that you are given to me in one of your many becomings, and once again there might be a temptation to think of "one of many" as partial. I'm not sure of that. Do you ever actually become a butterfly? Perhaps the metaphor is a little misplaced, because it implies that the butterfly is the realization of a becoming, a being that no longer becomes. You don't need to be realized because you are already real. You are always already a butterfly. You are a thousand butterflies. You are given to me as precisely as many butterflies as it takes to make our world.
Labels: Barbaras, butterflies, Deleuze, givenness, Kojima, you
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The appearance of something is always also the appearance of a world. The exploration of this thesis leads Barbaras to a radical phenomenological ontology. Let's see where he's going with this idea. He says that the world is constitutive of manifestation:
Appearance is always appearance within the world; any manifestation of something is in principle a comanifestation of a world. Indeed, the world is this open totality, this encompassing absolute, a field for all possible events. It is neither the sum of beings that emerge there nor a sort of super object, whether we conceive of it as an empty framework or a specific environment independent of what appears, but instead the vital force of any manifestation, an element that is not distinguished from it, precisely because it is not an object, an element that is therefore none other than the ensemble of manifestations and is constituted at the same time as they are. As Patoĉka writes: "The world is not sum, but preliminary totality. We cannot set ourselves outside the world, raise ourselves above it. The world is, by all its being, midst, in contrast with what it is the midst of. For this reason, it is never object. For this same reason, it is unique, indivisible. Any division, any individuation is in the world, but has no meaning for the world."
(Desire and Distance, pp. 63-64, emphases Barbaras' and Patoĉka's)
Appearance, Barbaras argues, is not originally appearance to consciousness, but appearance within a world. Instead of dealing with the problem of uniqueness as an attribute of consciousness, or of a subjective being, Barbaras' analysis puts forward the manifestation of the world as the locus of uniqueness. He again quotes Patoĉka's Papiers phénoménologiques:
There must be a unique connection at the interior of which is everything that there is. This unique connection is in the strict sense what is. . . . [I]t is the condition of all experiences. However, it is also the condition of all particular beings in their particular being. Thus the form-of-the-world (Weltform) of experience is also what makes an experience of the world possible. This all-encompassing being unique, it follows that it must always be there as the permanent backdrop to experience. This also implies that there cannot be two totalities of being and therefore, that experience as experience of being is necessarily concordant.
(quoted in Desire and Distance, p. 65, emphases Barbaras')
Barbaras says that the comanifestation of the world cannot be reduced "to the presence of a content, a being that would presuppose appearance" (p. 65). (Neither can it be reduced to a form, for "[a]s the originary unity of a given and a condition of givenness, the world is the identity of form and content, or rather their indifference" (p. 66).) And so we come to Barbaras' most radical departure from Husserl. If appearance is essentially characterized by a belonging to a world, this also holds true for the "extraordinary appearance of the human person to itself called consciousness" (p. 67, emphasis Barbaras'). I would not refer to the person as an "it," so immediately I am wondering whether Barbaras is keyed into the existential uniqueness of the world, and what he could possibly mean by emphasizing the world's uniqueness. The thrust of Barbaras' departure from Husserl is that reality is given priority over consciousness; [f]ar from the notion that the world is constituted in lived experiences, there are lived experiences only on the basis of the world" (p. 68). According to Barbaras, the lived experience, like the thing, is given in adumbrations (p. 67). So what does this mean ontologically? Barbaras argues that if all manifestations are simulataneously comanifestations of a world, then the appearing cannot be fully present in its manifestation, and manifestation is, therefore, characterized by obscurity or distance. This, he says, is the expression of appearing's being-in-the-world (p. 67). (Barbaras does not reference Heidegger; I suppose there is some question as to whether Merleau-Ponty's being-in-the-world is the same as Heidegger's.)
At this point I'm tempted to go straight for the problem of being. Barbaras' text, however, is rather sophisticated, and resists drawing easy conculsions. He hasn't done away with the notion of a conscious subject so much as displaced it.
[I]n subordinating consciousness of the self to the general structure of appearance, the subject is not reduced to insignificance; nor is any specifity in relation to other appearings denied to it. Clearly the autonomy of appearance cannot be understood as the autosubsistence of a being, nor therefore as an anonymous manifestation that would not imply constitutively someone to whom this appears. Indeed, it must be said that if the essence of appearance implies the manifestation of a world, the essence of this world implies that it cannot be distinguished from its manifestation. If it is true, as Patoĉka states, that appearance is the universe itself, it must be added that this universe is its appearance–in accordance with the unity of the esse and the percipi that Merleau-Ponty thematizes–and that this universe cannot be conceived of without reference to a "who" to whom it appears. In short, the fact that the subject (the one to whom the universe appears) is not a constituent part of the world but, on the contrary, is dependent on appearance as manifestation of a world does not rule out but rather implies that this subject is equally constitutive of this structure inasmuch as there is appearance of the world only as appearance for.
(p. 69)
Now that the who of the world has been restored (as a for whom), I wonder if there is an essential way of relating to the world. Do we essentially relate to the world personally or impersonally? Do we understand our own appearance (consciousness) as a person or a thing? Or is there a possiblity of polyvocality in all of our relations? Is appearance itself polyvocal? Barbaras says that appearance is univocal (p. 67), but I'm not sure of this. Does the structure of appearance determine how we relate to the world? Bodily? This is a strange aspect of Barbaras' argument: the subject is essentially incarnated becuase incarnation is demanded by the structure of phenomenality. "It is not because one is incarnated that one has a point of view on the world; rather, it is because the essence of phenomenality implies that the subject to whom the world appears be inscribed in it that one is incarnated. One's inscription in the world, which is realized as a body, is merely the consequence of the structure of any manifestation's constitutive belonging" (pp. 70-71). I don't know if I buy it, but let's see what happens to the question of being when embodiment is subordinated to the reality of the phenomenon.
Barbaras designates the being-in-the-world of the appearing as the horizon (p. 77). The horizon, he says, following Merleau-Ponty, is a new type of being (p. 78). It is a "mode of being that defies the principle of identity" (p. 79). Givenness by adumbrations is rooted in the horizon: "the act of adumbrating that gives meaning to the notion of adumbration is the work of the horizon. To conceive of appearance as structured according to a horizon is to think of adumbrating as being" (p. 79). Finally, Barbaras says that "the nature of originary givenness, insofar as it is the givenness of a world, is precisely that it involves a dimension of invisibility or transcendence that the concept of horizon names" (p. 80).
I'm left with a few questions about this ontology of the sensible, this notion of adumbrating as being. Is it existential? Is it empirical? It's certainly counterintuitive to make embodiment dependent upon appearance; if it has the effect of keeping the phenomenological reduction honest, there might in fact be a problem with the reduction. Lastly, does Barbaras' ontology tell us anything about uniqueness? Is uniqueness more a qaulity of our reality than it is a quality of our subjectivity?
Labels: Barbaras, experience, givenness, horizons, Merleau-Ponty, ontology, Patočka, phenomenology, uniqueness, world
Monday, June 04, 2007
I must be pretty jaded because it doesn't startle me at all that Barbaras would accuse Husserl of getting phenomenology all wrong. His critique of transcendental phenomenology, though, has the distinction of being quite enjoyable. Barbaras' main thrust is against the idea of a thing in itself, but by the same token he calls into question the meaning of lived experience. (I wonder if the idea of experience won't be a problem for him as the work unfolds. He won't, I think, argue that perception is given prior to experience.) Anyway, to join Barbaras' argument midstream, he says of Husserl:
[I]n supporting the appearance itself over an originary appearing (the lived experience) Husserl betrays the radicality of the phenomenological reduction. The fact that this appearing is not given by profiles but is instead characterized by the identity of its being and its manifestation does not change the fact that the autonomy of the phenomenal is entirely compromised. Appearance as appearance of things is completely dependent on a specific manifestation and therefore on the positing of an appearing being, the lived experience. In determining the appearance on the basis of the lived experience, Husserl abides by the phenomenological requirement that prescribes regressing from the appearing, whatever it might be, to its appearance; he remains therefore, in regard to the lived experience, on the level of the natural attitude. Indeed, as Patočka writes, "There is a phenomenal field, a being of the phenomenon as such, that cannot be reduced to any being which appears at its center and which it is therefore impossible to explain from being, whether the latter be a naturally objective species or egologically subjective."
In this context, there is a lack of unitarian concept of the phenomenal that would include the natural reality and the lived experience and that would thus allow one to bridge the eidetic abyss that Husserl regards as separating consciousness and reality. But such a concept assumes a more radical époché, one that permits devitalization of the positing of the lived experience as self-evident and therefore finished with the pseudoevidence of consciousness.
(Desire and Distance, pp.33-34, emphasis Barbaras')
Barbaras rejects the notion that there are two types of lived experience: the sensuous hylé which is the "pure experiencing of what is grasped without distance" and the noematic moment, the kind of lived experience that "animates the hyletic data by apprehending them in accordance with a sense that confers upon them an ostensive function–that constitutes them as manifestations of something" (p. 22). Barbaras is certain that appearance is given by adumbrations but he is suspicious of noesis, "a mysterious concept whose specific function is to allow the hyletic datum to rejoin the objectivity from which was originally severed, accounting for the movement of adumbrating; this is a concept that bears the burden of intentionality" (p. 30). (My sense is that Barbaras considers the idea of the intentionality of consciousness to be a distorting bias that Husserl brought to his phenomenology.) The essential problem here, though, is that Husserl defines lived experience as what can be given in reflection, as what can become the object of internal perception (pp. 30-31).
Barbaras says that unquestionably the world is experienced in that appears to someone, and that this is a "subjective" reality. But, he says, "the recognition of this fact in no way prejudices what we must understand exactly by lived experience and the sense of being of the subjective. It could very well be that the subjective being of the world does not contradict its transcendence; indeed, that the appearance of the subjective–the cogito–is originally dependent on the manifestation of the world" (p.31). According to Barbaras, perception reveals an absolutely original mode of givenness, one that is partial (given in adumbrations), "that calls into question the rationalist requirement of exhaustive givenness" (p. 41). It is by clinging to this experience of the event of appearance that we can extricate ourselves from the quandry of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology (p.43).
So, finally, if Barbaras is justified in seeing Husserlian lived experience as colored by the natural attitude, what then characterizes lived experience as seen from within the époché? What can or cannot be said about it? Barbaras says that "the partiality of givenness is its very condition" (p.36).. Is this the way we really encounter things, or is this a presupposition?
Labels: Barbaras, epoché, experience, givenness, Husserl, perception
Friday, May 11, 2007
In my reading of Jean-Luc Marion's books on givenness I got caught up in the difference between the being of the transcendental ego and the being of transcendental objects. I felt that if givenness were to be regarded as foundational, it should then be said equally of transcendental beings and the transcendental ego. A similar set of issues now arises from my reading of Renaud Barbaras, who, like Marion, is concerned with phenomenality as such (though unlike Marion he does not turn to Heidegger, relying solely on his reading of Husserl on this point). Barbaras says that "the characteristic of lived experiences is not given by adumbrations. Nothing in it exceeds its manifestation; it is nothing more than it appears, an absolute identity between appearing and manifestation" (Desire and Distance, p. 21). Does this mean that in phenomenological analysis there is a bifurcation between "lived experience" and plain experience, paralleling the bifurcation between the givenness of consciousness and the givenness of phenomena, and between the being of consciousness and the being of transcendental objects? Is this characterization of lived experience true to experience? If we set aside the natural attitude, is it true to experience as given through the époché? Let's see where Barbaras is leading us:
On the basis of [the] opposition between the absolute being of consciousness and contingent being of of the transcendent, Husserl is then able to take the step of constituting the transcendent within transcendental consciousness.
It is therefore not surprising that Husserl neither sticks to his description of perception as givenness by adumbrations nor attempts to conceive of appearance on the basis of manifestations insofar as they are the manifestations of things. On the contrary, he reinvests in a concept of appearance that lies at the heart of Ideas I and that alone can sustain the manifestation of a transcendence; to say of a reality that it appears is to say that is apprehended in and by a consciousness and therefore that it is constituted by means of lived experiences. The appearance of the worldly appearing necessarily refers to a more originary sense of phenomonality, namely the manifestation of the lived experience to itself; to appear is either to be lived or to be constituted by means of lived experiences.
(p. 22, emphases Barbaras')
So is lived experience is a given? How? Is it only by means of the phenomenological reduction that one can access lived experience? If that is the case, then what else must be given prior to the discovery of lived experience?
Labels: Barbaras, experience, givenness, Husserl, Marion
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Renaud Barbaras' Desire and Distance affords me the opportunity to re-explore the problem of givenness that I first encountered through Marion's works. Barbaras points to the section in Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences that falls under the heading "the universal a priori of correlation between the object of experience and its modes of givenness" (Crisis, § 46). Barbaras draws a conclusion from Husserl: "Every being is the index of a subjective system of correlation, which signifies that any person imaginable can access being as such only through subjective data; the absolute character of being, in the sense that it is what relies on itself, does not from an alternative with the fact that its modes of access are relative to a finite subject" (Desire and Distance, p. 4). The key to following Barbaras' interpretation here is the idea of the finite subject. Husserl's meaning in this section is not entirely clear to me. He seems to be saying that givenness is tied to presence, and that this can only have meaning for a being of some temporal depth. He says:
Perception is related only to the present. But this present is always meant as having an endless past behind it and an open future before it. We soon see that we need the intentional analysis of recollection as the orginal manner of being conscious of the past; but we also see that such an analysis presupposes in principle that of perception, since memory, curiously enough, implies having-perceived. If we consider perception abstractly, by itself, we find its intentional accomplishment to be presentation, making something present: the object gives itself as "there," originally there, present. But in this presence, as that of an extended and enduring object, lies a continuity of what I am still conscious of, what has flowed away and is no longer intuited at all, a continuity of "retentions"–and, in the other direction, a continuity of "protentions." Yet this is not, like memory in the usual sense of intuitive "recollection," a phenomenon which openly, so to speak, plays a part in object- and world-apperception. And thus the different modes of presentification in general enter into the universal investigation we are undertaking here, namely, that of inquiring consistently and exclusively after the how of the world's manner of givenness, its open or implicit "intentionalities."
(Crisis, p. 160, emphases Husserl's)
If Barbaras is justified in regarding the problem of the hermeneutic circle as secondary to the problem of the reality of perception, he still leaves open a problem of how givenness is interepreted, and what kind of being is subject to givenness. Is a temporal being, a finite subject, necessarily a being who interprets? Do we need to understand interpretation as something multilayered? Is the finding of meaning limited to subject-object relations, or can we see in our experience a kind of raw givenness that we interpret in a way other than the way we interpret objects?
Labels: Barbaras, givenness, Husserl, perception
Friday, November 10, 2006
If Deleuze is right that philosophy is about creating concepts, then I wonder if I will ever be a philosopher, because the simplest concepts stupify me. Lately I've been ruminating on concepts of thinking, being, life, the body, the subject, the world. I don't know what these concepts mean, not conceptually, not with any certainty. I don't have knowledge of them, don't know what such knowledge would resemble or how it could be described. I read descriptions and occasionally offer some of my own, but they remain provisional in my mind. I'm not dead certain about anything I write here. Even my recent disagreement with Judith Butler, which I feel strongly about, really boils down to little more than a sense that the kind of evidence that would support her assertion isn't the kind of evidence that would matter; it's a question of having the right perspective about what is originary in experience, and while I can't say exactly what the right perspective is, I feel I can recognize a strong claim such as hers as being dubious, as not being true to life. That's not a whole lot offer, I know.
Nontheless I remain open to creative philosophical concepts, and I take some pleasure in reading and sharing those with you. So allow me to mention "passibility," as understood by Jean-François Lyotard ("Something Like: 'Communication....without Communication,' in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, pp. 108-118). Passibility is neither an activity nor a passivity, but rather a feeling, a possibility of experiencing (pathos) that presupposes a donation (pp. 110-111). This feeling is "the immediate welcoming of what is given" (p. 111).
Lyotard is talking about aesthetic sentiment, but I wonder whether this mode of experiencing (pathos) isn't more generalizable. It's not perfectly clear. Lyotard states that the donation, equivalent to what Heidegger calls Being, "which is experienced before (or better, in) any capture or conceptualization gives matter for reflection, for the conception, and it is on it, for it, that we are going to construct our aesthetic philosophy and our theories of communication" (p. 111). Now is this passibility then the inauguration of a philosophy of the aesthetic or an aesthetics of philosophy? Perhaps it depends on what we make of his emphasis on the word "in." In one sense the conceptual, philosophy's stock-in-trade, becomes like so much gift wrapping, an inversion of the priveleged relation of concept over style.
Should philosophy be disconcerting? If so, there's a lot to be said for Lyotard's passibility. But even then I don't know what to make of gift wrapping. People handle it in all kinds of ways, and I can't say any one of them is the only right way to do it. Here's Lyotard to walk it home:
Passibility: the opposite of 'impassibility'? Something is not destined for you, there is no way to feel it. You are touched, you will only know this afterwards. (And in thinking you know it, you will be mistaken about this 'touch.') We imagine that minds are made anxious by not intervening in the production of the product. It is because we think of presence according to the exclusive modality of masterful intervention. Not to be contemplative is sort of an implicit commandment, contemplation is perceived as a devalorized passivity.
(p. 118)
Labels: givenness, Lyotard, philosophy