Fido the Yak

Heidegger analyzes the question of nothingness and argues that it's logically impossible to question the nothing without making something of it (What is Metaphysics?). How do we question the nothing without calling it into being? The question of the nothing, he says, robs itself of its own object. He continues:

Wenn wir uns aber durch die formale Unmöglichkeit der Frage nach dem Nichts nicht beirren lassen and ihr entgegen die Frage dennoch stellen, dann müssen wir zum mindesten dem genügen, was als Grunderfordernis für die mögliche Durchführung jeder Frage bestehen bleibt. Wenn das Nichts, wie immer, befragt werden soll–es selbst–dann muß es zuvor gegeben sein. Wir müssen ihm begegnen können.

However, if we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by the formal impossibility of the question of the nothing and nevertheless confront the question, then we must satisfy what is a basic requirement for the possible carrying through of any question. If the nothing itself would be questioned then it must be given beforehand. We must be able to encounter it.

Possibly there is no nothing itself but only a nothing als etwas. In calling the nothing into question we would indeed be questioning the formal concept of an imaginary nothing, perhaps because that's all that's meant by thinking "nothing." So what then do we make of the requirement that we be able to meet what we question before we begin to question? Or that the questioned must be given? Is givenness never to be called into question? Is a question never to be creative?

Is a question essentially a consciousness? Let's say that it is a conscious act. We might call such an act a thought just for the sake of following Heidegger's argument. He says that thinking, which is essentially always thinking of something, while it is thinking of the nothing must act contrary to its own essence. Wouldn't it be more likely for thought to operate contrary to the essence of the nothing before operating contrary to itself? (Our ideas about the nature of thought may not be compatible.) Yet the thinking of nothing is not so simple. We need something like a temporal horizon to interpret the way thought brings itself into the thinking of the nothing; the nothing appears as the residue of what thought accomplished just now, reflects upon it, sums it up–no, that's not quite it. It responds. In negation it's as if everything that had come before possibly to affirm the present moment had been posed in the form of a question and then answered in the negative. Here it's not a matter of negation revealing the primacy of a question, but one of negation simply unfolding in the horizon of a questioning, or indeed, a culture of questioning.

Does questioning, when directed at the nothing or at anything, ever operate contrary to its essence? Would only being able to address the already given be more in keeping with the essence of an answer than a question? How would we know when a question had violated itself? Obviously we may see questioning operate contrary to the way we feel questioning should operate. It can operate contrary to its ideal. But how much do we really know about the operation of the question? Or should I say the "carrying through" of the question? What do we already know about how a question is carried through? How do we begin to study it? I'll keep you posted.

Labels: Heidegger, intentionality, nothingness, questions

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:35 AM. 4 comments

Merleau-Ponty describes Descartes' Cogito ergo sum as the "Open Sesame!" of fundamental thought. Fundamental, Merleau-Ponty says, "because it is not borne by anything, but not fundamental as if with it one reached a foundation upon which one ought to base oneself and stay. As a matter of principle, fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish, an abyss" (Signs, "Introduction," p. 21). The never stand still of the self corresponds to a never stand still of being. Merleau-Ponty asserts that "the world and Being hold together only in movement; it is only in this way that all things can be together" (p. 22). Should we want all things to be together? Is there an incestuous impulse beneath Merleau-Ponty's chiasma of the flesh, or beneath the discussion of Being in general? What role do boundaries play in Thinking? The role of dramaturge? Does the never stand still have its Open Sesame in stillness, its point zero, as Kojima might suggest it must have; is there a chiasmus of the never stand still?

Let's spend a moment with the idea of the abyss. The abyss, Merleau-Ponty assures us, is not nothing. Here is some context:

Now as before, philosophy begins with a "What is thinking?" and is absorbed in the question to begin with. No instruments or organs here. It is a pure "It seems to me that." He whom all things appear before cannot be hidden from himself. He appears to himself first of all. He is this appearance of self to self. He springs forth from nothing; no thing and no one can stop him from being himself, or help him. He always was, he is everywhere, he is king on his desert island.

But the first truth can only be a half-truth. It opens upon something different. There would be nothing if there were not that abyss of self. But an abyss is not nothing; it has environs and edges. One always thinks of something; about, according to, in the light of something; with regard to, in contact with something. Even the action of thinking is caught up in the push and shove of being. I cannot think of identically the same thing for more than an instant. The opening is in principle immediately filled, as if lived only in a nascent state.

(p. 14)

Thinking takes place in contact–is this a half-truth? What sort of contact? Merleau-Ponty, in an almost Jamesian masculine voice, speaks of the push and shove of being. The masculine persona can only ever be half the story–and not even that. Who will speak for the caress of being? Who will speak for the soft contours of the abyss?

It seems to me that thinking is not an abyss, but is urgently in contact with the abyss. Yet what does thinking know of contact? Who taught it to touch? Has thinking always known contact and only been taught to forget, only learned to remember? Con-tact, the dictionary assures us, is mutual. It is the state or condition of touching, of two bodies touching each other. Can there be contact without boundaries? If I recognize the paper of my copy of Signs as flesh, what boundary is there between this flesh and my flesh? The book is the flesh of whose world?

The urgency of thinking is this: not to be borne but to be in contact with the abyss. I dream I walk on air and every step is a wonder. It is a recurring dream, as I may have mentioned before, yet still every step is a wonder. Merleau-Ponty struggles with repetition as anybody who thinks urgently must, although perhaps he imagines his struggle is with the identical. Can he for an instant think of identically the same thing? For an instant? For an instant? The instant is always at the back of thinking, the opening of the never stand still–Look, you're gliding over the abyss! The instant is not the vertical, though it has its leanings. It will not be repeated.

I receive these words as prophecy:

To make of language a means or a code for thought is to break it. When we do so we prohibit ourselves from understanding the depth to which words sound within us–from understanding that we have a need, a passion, for speaking and must (as soon as we think) speak to ourselves; that words have power to arouse thoughts and implant henceforth inalienable dimensions of thought; and that they put responses on our lips we did not know we were capable of, teaching us, Sartre says, our own thought.

(p. 17)

Labels: abyss, body, intentionality, language, Merleau-Ponty, motility, ontology, thinking, touch

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:29 AM. 0 comments

Two passages from Patočka's discussion of the phenomenon according to Husserl (Introduction, Chapter 4). First passage:

[I]ntentionality proves to be at the root of appearance, of the manifestation of the object. It becomes possible to trace its "genesis," its "constitution," because the object is not merely intentionally given but constructed in the intentional activity. This is an unexpected relust, opening up an entirely new perspective. Intentionality appears to us as an active process of which we have no inkling in ordinary experience because there we rest content with bare results, always already in some sense complete and fixated. Since intentionality aims essentially at the object and does not normally pause at lived experience, there follows from this quite logically the tendency of our lived experience to overlook itself, not to see itself in how and often even that it is at all. If we are to live in things and with things, we must not live in ourselves and in our comprehension of ourselves–an aspect of the activity of lived experience from which Heidegger and Sartre will later deduce an insurmountable "existential" tendency of life to avoid its most authentic tasks, to avoid itself in its preoccupation with things which are in their entire nature different from the human mode of being, the tendency of lived experience to be rid of itself, to alienate, externalize and reify itself–an experiential approach to the phenomenon of alienation.

(p. 65, Patočka's emphases)

Can we recover something of our selves in our relations to things? How about our relations to others? Would the tendency towards alienation be comparable in both cases?

Second passage:

[T]he world is not merely an object, an objectival synthesis, but, thanks to the object, a perceptual field. This open perceptual field is contemporaneous with our actual lived experiences, immanent in the same present, yet not subjective! Thus further distinctions are needed besides those which Husserl offers. Apart from subjective immanence we need to distinguish a presentational immanence which is not coextensive with the subjective. Not all that is immanent in the present is subjectively immanent, though all that is presentationally immanent is guaranteed in the sense that its givenness at present is at the same time a guarantee of existence; for it is here, in person, so that we cannot imagine any greater accessibility or presence. Thus any attempt to declare something an illusion is applicable only to constituted meaning outside presence, not to the phenomenon of objectival givenness as such.

(p. 70, Patočka's emphases)

Would it make sense to speak of copresentational immanence? What would the difference be between copresence and coevality. Is copresence necessarily metaphysical (what would that mean?) while coevality is not? Could we fairly declare illusional a phenomenon of intersubjective givenness? Is alientation subjectively immanent, or is that an alienated view? Because it would be a paradox to say that we are alienated from our lived experience, we might hesitate to say that an immanent, open perceptual field can be shared. We shouldn't hesitate as long as we can find evidence of such a field. Instead we should question what alienation means. After all, what is the full meaning of openness?

Labels: alienation, intentionality, Patočka, presence

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:03 AM. 0 comments

Nancy describes the logos as the free access to its own essence, and he says that "it is only on the surface of philosophy. . .that the logic of freedom passes, for it answers to nothing other than the existing opening of thought" (The Experience of Freedom, p. 63, Nancy's emphases). Again he considers existence as thinking, and says this is "not a thinking about anything unless it is a thinking for the freedom of being-in-the-world. In short, it is the praxis of the logos (or 'practical reason'), which is not so much a 'theoretical practice' as that which brings the logos to its limit, on the very limit of existence, which the logos 'grasps' not by absorbing or subsuming, but instead by assuming the fact that the freedom of existence is what gives it–and strips it of–its own essence of logos" (p. 65, Nancy's emphases). Am I wrong to see in this a critique of intentionality? We could try to salvage something of intentionality in the form of a consciousness for. But is it worth salvaging at this juncture? Nancy has already exposed an other thought. Are we dancing here with the praxis of this other?

Labels: freedom, intentionality, logos, Nancy

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:11 AM. 5 comments

Kojima calls attention to the following section from Husserl's Crisis (I'm using Carr's translation because its handy):

We perform the epochē–we who are philosophizing in a new way–as a transformation of the attitude which precedes it not accidentally but essentially, namely, the attitude of natural human existence which, in its total historicity, in life and science, was never before interrupted. But it is necessary, now, to make really transparent the fact that we are not left with a meaningless, habitual abstension; rather, it is through this abstention that the gaze of the philosopher in truth first becomes fully free: above all, free of the strongest and most universal, and at the same time most hidden, internal bond, namely of the pregivenness of the world. Given in and through this liberation is the discovery of the universal, absolutely self-enclosed and absolutely self-sufficient correlation between the world itself and world-consciousness. By the latter is meant the conscious life of the subjectivity which effects the validity of the world, the subjectivity which always has the world in its enduring acquisitions and continues to actively shape it anew. And there results, finally, taken in the broadest sense, the absolute correlation between beings of every sort and every meaning, on the one hand, and absolute subjectivity, as constituting meaning and ontic validity in this broadest manner, on the other hand.

(§ 41)

For Kojima Husserl's thinking here marks a repudiation of his earlier Cartesianism, which is stunted by a premature "return to the subject." Kojima comments, "It is remarkable that here the consciousness produced by the epoché is no longer called pure consciousness but rather a world-consciousness, and that the correlation between consciousness and the world is emphasized rather than the self-sufficiency of consciousness itself" (Monad and Thou, p. 41). However, whereas Husserl stresses the freedom of the philosopher from the pregiven world, Kojima stresses the ineluctability of the world even in and through the epoché, and he designates this world as pregiven, as prethetic. Kojima turns to Husserl's argument in Experience and Judgement that the world is a precondition of all praxis, including the praxis of life and the praxis of cognition, and he criticizes Husserl for not seeing the full meaning of this argument:

We may ask, however, does Husserl adequately grasp this world [of world-consciousness] in truth? Indeed, he attained a quite correct recognition of pregivenness, indubitable certainty, and the passivity of the world. However, he fails, it seems, to gain an authentic insight into the profoumd relevance of the "pre-thetic" character of the world insofar as we can tell from Experience and Judgement. As a result he did not discover the prethetic self (Existence) thematically as the necessary indubitable correlate of this world. His regress to the ideal region of "transcental subjectivity" begins anew.

That he did not recognize the authentic meaning of the "pre-positionality" of the world is clearly shown by the fact that he identified this world immediately with the life-world, the field of intersubjective daily praxis. However, as he himself acknowledged elsewhere, this world is the precondition or the universal basis of all praxis; therefore it is the precondition or the basis of the life-world and is not the life-world itself.

If we confuse the reduction of the pre-thetic world with the reduction to the life-world, the pre-thetic self will inevitably become entangled in a chaos of various theses through the reduction, among them the kinesthetic thesis. According to this account Husserl must again refrain from any commitment to the general thesis of the world and must insist on the reduction to solitary transcendental subjectivity as the second stage of the epoché, as can be seen in First Philosophy and in the Crisis. As a result, the life-world, including the psychological ego, becomes an integration of intentional objects that must be constituted by transcendental subjectivity alone, though on the basis of an anonymous pregivenness. One cannot deny the (somewhat lukewarm) resonance of Cartesianism even in Husserl's latest period of thought.

(pp. 46-47)

I recall that for Husserl of the Cartesian Meditations the intrinsically first being is transcendental intersubjectivity (§ 64), so in one sense the discovery of world-consciousness is a minor modification of Husserl's phenomenology. Perhaps the key issue revolves around what steps one takes to discover the first being and then what steps one takes after such a being has been discovered. And yet we may wonder at why Husserl didn't discover existence as the "necessary indubitable correalate of this world" if indeed such is the case. What qualities does existence have (worldliness, disposition, a relation to others) that transcendental subjectivity lacks? Can we discover these qualities through the epoché, or does the phenomenological method require that we return to the subject?

Before I get to Kojima's conclusions, I want to explore a few of the ramifications of his analysis so far. The first ramification is that the thesis of intentionality is undermined. Consciousness, according to Kojima, is consciousness of the pregiven world before it is consciousness of something (p. 44). Is this simply to say that the horizon is a universal originary fact of consciousness? Well, Kojima's model for world-consciousness is not perception but imagination. This, I think, ties into another elaboration of his analysis, concerning the problem of embodiment.

Renaud Barbaras, as you may remember, holds that embodiment pertains to the subject because the structure of phenomenality demands it (see The Uniqueness of the World). Kojima puts forward a similar kind of argument, but whereas Barbaras would have us broaden our understanding of perception to get to this point, Kojima sees phenomenality as the business of the imagination. As I understand it, Kojima is saying that embodiment is an aspect of thrownness, and the agent of throwness is our old friend transcendental subjectivity. Hmm. It's a little difficult for me tell where Kojima's critical interpretation of Husserl leaves off and his own thinking begins. Let me recount what he says on the matter.

At this point we are aware that this stage of transition from the pre-thetic, pregiven world to the general thesis of the life-world, on the side of the world, must correspond exactly to that of the transition from the pre-thetic self to the transcendental corporeal (somatic) ego, on the side of the subject. The pre-thetic self as the primordial form of Existence is necessarily thrown into the common general-thetic world by the radical reflection of transcendental subjectivity, and it is given the kinesthetic vestment of voluminosity (body-schema) and becomes a corporeal ego. This voluminosity or spatial corporeity of the ego accompanied by the nonreflective transcendental consciousness is able to constitute a similar voluminosity analogically around any image given from the world at a stroke through the transcendental principle of coupling. This is to say that to constitute an object in the life-world we need no complete sythetic convergence of images. A certain image will associatively call up an optimum image and then, tout à coup, an inner horizon will be established around it through transcendental coupling (what Husserl describes in section 38 of the Cartesian Meditations as primal foundation or Urstiftung through passive synthesis seems to coincide with this, at least as a result).

Therefore, the pre-thetic world and the pre-thetic self do not suddenly disappear even in the establishment of the general thesis of the life-world by transcendental subjectivity. Rather, the pre-thetic world remains as the dimension of the optimum image of the object and its meaning, and the pre-thetic self remains as the dimension of imagination and projection.

(pp. 49-50)

Kojima has intended to show that the proper agent of transcendental reflection is not the transcendental ego, as Husserl believed, but the somatic ego (p. xii). Its puzzling that he says this and then posits a thrownness into corporality by the radical reflection of a transcendental subjectivity. Kojima's somatic ego appears to be more a creature of phenomenality than a being defined by its existential thrownness into the world. Well, I have my doubts. He concludes:

We are not primal transcendental subjectivity as an ego that is able to posit everything including its own essence, nor are we primordial world-Being as a nature-monad that produces everything in its own image. We are rather a Being-in-between with double subjectivities, defined by both extremities, whose somatic inbetweenness should be the theme of investigation for future philosophy....

(p. 63).

I don't how far I'd travel down that road, but I reckon that Kojima is right in noticing world-consciousness as a problem and in seeing its relation to the problem of embodiment.

Labels: Barbaras, body, epoché, Husserl, intentionality, Kojima, lifeworld, phenomenology, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:28 PM. 0 comments

The époché, properly performed, has the potential to liberate space from mere objectivity. This is a strong claim put forward by Hiroshi Kojima in Monad and Thou: Phenomenological Ontology of Human Being. He says that "[s]pace as the schema of interintentionality is neither mere subjectivity nor mere objectivity" (p. 9). Well, a lot of philosophy claims to be neither subjective nor objective. The problem seems to be that in working out such a perspective, philosophers make assumptions that tacitly require the a priori existence of either a subjective or an objective reality. Let's look at how Kojima proposes to work the problem out, and see if he manages to avoid any obvious pitfalls.

Husserl failed, in Kojima's view, to recognize the originary plurality of the transcendental consciousness (pp. 4-5). Consequently his view of intersubjectivity is narrowly egological. Other egos are not only discovered after an empathic introjection of one's own consciousness into other bodies; rather, they are present from the gitgo in the fabric of consciousness. "The intentionalities of other egos are not," Kojima insists, "noemata of my intentionality; rather they are co-noeses with mine" (p. 5). How could we know that our noetic faculty wasn't purely or merely our own, that there exists something like a conoesis in every moment of consciousness? Kojima thinks we can answer this question by reexamining the problem of "appresentation," as outlined by Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. The key question here is, How do we know that things have a behind? How do we know that there is a rear aspect to things we perceive? Kojima doubts that it's my intentionality that appresents the behind of things. Neither can the appresentation of a behind of things be explained as an "empty" intention. Here Kojima presents a logical objection (and draws a rather startling conclusion):

In order even to turn a thing over, I must know in advance that it has another side! Thus the back of a thing cannot be defined by my empty intention, to be fulfilled in turning the thing around. Rather my intention directed toward the reverse side is empty, or imperfect, because it is not originally my intention.

(p. 6)

It's instructive at this point to contrast Kojima's take on the imperfectness of perception with Barbaras' riff on adumbrations. Barbaras thinks that Husserl's insight into perception points to a new kind of being, being-at-a-distance, and the inexhaustibility of perception ultimately points to the impossibility of satisfying desire, which is the heart of the living subject. For Kojima, on the other hand, it seems that the same set of ideas about perception would lead to a questioning of the intentionality of consciousness, concluding that the ownness of an intention towards an object of perception can not be taken for granted.

So how does this tie into the idea of a spatial schema that is neither objective nor subjective? Kojima directs his critique of Husserlian intersubjectivity towards the analysis of Here and There in the Cartesian Meditations.

As reflexively related to itself, my animate bodily organism (in my primordial sphere) has the central "Here" as its mode of givenness; every other body, and accordingly the "other's" body, has the mode "There." This orientation, "There", can be freely changed by virtue of kinesthesias. Thus, in my primordial sphere, the one spatial "Nature" is constituted throughout the change in orientations, and constituted moreover with an intentional relatedness to my animate organism as functioning perceptually. Now the fact that my bodily organism can be (and is) apprehended as a natural body existing and movable in space like any other is manifestly connected with the possibility expressed in the words: By free modification of my kinesthesias, particularily those of locomotion, I can change my position in such a manner that I convert any There into a Here–that is to say, I could occupy any spatial locus with my organism.

(Cartesian Meditations, § 53, Husserl's emphases)

For Husserl it seems that the core experience of other people rests on an imaginative possibility (as if) of Here becoming There (§ 54). Kojima comments that "the essence of Husserl's theory of intersubjectivity lies not in pairing-association nor in appresentative empathy, but rather in the possibility of removing the center from Here to There" (p. 8). Kojima objects to this analysis because in order for it to hold water one would have to imagine "a kind of 'objective,' homogeneous space quite independent of the position of the center," a space in which everything can be seen from a plurality of perspectives "prior to any movement of the body" (p. 8, emphasis mine). The joining of every presentation of There to an appresentation of Here, egologically, means that Husserl's intersubjectivity, according to Kojima, presupposes the existence of other consciousnesses before it thematizes the bodies of others (p. 9). Thus Kojima's critique is twofold.

It's difficult to evaluate Kojima's critique at this point because he has not yet presented his idea of the somatic ego, nor has he elaborated his analysis of the Here, the absolute, immovable center of experience. If he thinks that we can arrive at a spatial schema of interintenionality without presuming other consciousnesses before thematizing other bodies, then he might mean to say that the ability to apperceive the behind of things is a bodily knowledge, and, perhaps, that it is interintentional because it is embodied. We'll see.

Finally, I have to ask whether sounds have a behind. If the answer is no, then I think Kojima's project of philosophizing a space that is neither objective nor subjective might be in jeopardy, because it would appear that acoustic space and visual are constituted differently and quite possibly subjectively–that is, we could imagine a space in which vibrations occured without concern for whether they were heard or seen, but this space would not be consistent with our experience of space. On the other hand, we might answer yes, it is possible to apperceive the rear aspect of a sound. If that's the case, we might wonder about the position of silence in space, whether it can ever be absolute, and whether it is constituted conoetically.

Labels: epoché, Husserl, intentionality, intersubjectivity, Kojima, noesis, perception, silence

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:03 AM. 4 comments

Deleuze wraps up his discussion of the actualization of the virtual:

Actualisation takes place in three series: space, time and also consciousness. Every spatio-temporal dynamism is accompanied by the emergence of an elementary consciousness which itself traces directions, doubles movements and migrations, and is born on the threshold of the condensed singularities of the body or object whose consciousness it is. It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something: it is the double of this something, and everything is consciousness because it possesses a double, even if it is far off and very foreign. Repetition is everywhere, as much as in what is actualised as in its actualisation. It is in the Idea to begin with, and it runs through the varieties of relations and the distribution of singular points. It also determines the reproductions of space and time, as it does the reprises of consciousness.

(Difference and Repetition, p. 220, emphasis mine)

Sinthome recently posted a very good explanation of how Deleuze's account of individuation underlies his thinking about learning and Ideas, which I think is helpful in grasping what Deleuze means by the sentence that I've emphasized. There is yet another implication which I'd like to explore. Speaking of conceptual blockage, Deleuze asks provocatively "who blocks the concept, if not the Idea?" (p. 220, emphasis Deleuze's). I take it to be Deleuze's position that the who of the idea is not an identity. Does this make sense? What sort of who can we mean when speaking of the who of the idea?

Labels: consciousness, Deleuze, ideas, intentionality, larval subjects, panpsychism, repetition

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:50 PM. 0 comments

Nancy says:

Before phenomenological intentionality and the constitution of the ego, but also before thinglike consistency as such, there is co-oringarity according to the with. Properly speaking, then. there is no anteriority: co-originarity is the most general structure of all con-sistency, all con-stitution, and all con-sciousness.

(Being singular plural, pp. 40-41)

Isn't this exactly the problem of the lifeworld in Husselian phenomenology? Is it a solution? Nancy's "problem of the city" (p.35) goes directly to the heart of the matter of coexistence. The coevality of what exists upsets the privileged position of the transcendental ego. On what basis do we understand the coeveality of existence? Nancy suggests ethical and experiential grounds for accepting coevality, but the core of his argument is an appeal to reason: How can one be counted unless more exist to be counted?

Assuming Nancy's reasoning about the singular plural is correct, does it follow that the "with" of being is (logically) prior to intentionality? Can being-with not be being-with-something? What does the doctrine of intentionality make of indefiniteness in general? Are there limits to the open-endedness of coexistence? If so, where would those come from?

Labels: coexistence, intentionality, lifeworld, Nancy

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:21 AM. 0 comments