Fido the Yak

"It is a characteristic of the philosophical interrogation," Merleau-Ponty says (Visible, p. 160, in Barbaras, Being, p. 88), "that it return upon itself, that it ask itself what to question is and what to respond is." I note how Merleau-Ponty includes response in his characterization of the philosophical question. Questioning proceeds from speech, which I tentatively define as both expression and response, that is, as a modality of intersubjective life, which patterns its inner dynamic. Here's a question, then, about the definition of the question: Does the question necessarily express anything?

Is it possible that the question necessarily expresses doubt? Does doubt express anything? What does doubt have to do with the eidos of the question? Barbaras states that doubt is shown by Merleau-Ponty, in his critique of Descartes, to be "inadequate to the sense of philosophical interrogation" (Being, p. 89). He means Cartesian doubt, it must be made clear, and I reckon the meaning of "philosophical" deserves to be explored a little. We can keep the question in mind, however, redefining terms as needed.

Isn't there something deliberately weak, from a philosophical viewpoint, about inquiring into the eidos of the question? There may be some call for a defense of a postcritical eideticism, a call for some kind of philosophical statement. What do we mean, though, by philosophy? What makes a statement or a question philosophical? Philosophy is always a return from constructa to lived experience, Merleau-Ponty says ("The Philosopher and Sociology," Signsp. 112). Philosophy does not rest still with social theory but plunges into the intersubjective world–in the mode of questioning? What sort of an engagement is that? It would by the definition given above be intersubjective or coexistential. Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty continues his thought, "has a dimension of its own, the dimension of coexistence–not as a fait accompli and an object of contemplation, but as the milieu and perpetual event of the universal praxis" (p. 113). Universal praxis. Do we need to perform an eidetic reduction of the praxis of the question along the way of inquiring into eidos of the question? How do we make the return to lived experience—as if something about our reflections or our ideas hadn't been living. Curious. Did we ever leave lived experience expecting to learn something in return? Our questions inhere in ex-pectations?

Merleau-Ponty argues that Husserl's promotion of the Lebenswelt to be the central theme of phenomenology is not inconsistent with certain earlier thinking about eidetic intuition as confirmation of experience. But hasn't the eidetic shifted meaning? Should we recognize some tergiversation in phenomenology's grappling with the eidos? Would that be an adequate reason to turn our attention completely away from the eidetic?

When the recognition of the life-world, and thus too of language as we live it, becomes characteristic of phenomenology. . .this is only a more resolute way of saying that philosophy does not possess the the truth about language and the world from the start, but is rather the recuperation and first formulation of a Logos scattered out in our world and our life and bound to their concrete structures–that "Logos of the aesthetic world" already spoken of in the Formal and Transcendental Logic. Husserl will only be bringing the movement of all his previous thought to completion when he writes in a posthumous fragment that transitory inner phenomena are brought to ideal existences by becoming incarnate in language. Ideal existence, which at the beginning of Husserl's thought was to have been the foundation for the possibility of language, is now the most characteristic possibility of language.

(p. 105, my bold)

A warning from Barbaras, who argues that the phenomenon of speech calls for a phenomenological reduction, "a reduction that allows us to understand the world on the basis of this possibility, that is, to understand the world as sense. By characterizing sense in terms of positive meaning, however, the philosophy of essence testifies just as much to its misunderstanding of speech. It considers the expressive operation as something completed; it forgets operative speech in favor of constructed speech. Instead of interrogating the emergence of language in the world, it naively gives itself language in the form of the world" (p. 109).

If there is something circular in the idea of the philosophical question, there may equally be a circularity in the idea of the question. Well, the question does not ask itself. That too is its eidos, or an aspect of its eidos, which must be "held and understood within the openness it unfolds" (p. 106; NB, Barbaras is speaking of "the absolute" here).

Finally I'll say a word about doubt, which may pertain to Cartesian doubt, or other forms of doubt. It is possible to sustain, as a kind of doubt, a hypothesis of the hypothetical which is irreducible to a negation of any given existence, but rather simply an indifference to any secondary claim about existence that hasn't been tried; a doubt which parenthesizes in lieu of either affirmation or denial. I am aware of the criticisms of this position, but am not yet convinced by them. Perhaps we should learn what doubt really is before deciding whether or not the question necessarily expresses doubt, philosophical or otherwise. Must one detach oneself from doubt in order to study doubt? Must one negate the experience of doubt in order to ken its essence? (We would be speaking of "morphological," inexact essences; that much we take from our readings). And wouldn't we have to ken the essence of doubt in order to answer any question of its necessity as a precondition, perhaps, for the question, the experience and the idea of the question. "The very being of the question," Barbaras writes, "excludes the possibility that the question remain without a response, gaping toward a transcendence" (pp.89-90). As I interpret him, Barbaras is speaking specifically of the Cartesian question, such as it is as a kind of commonplace, the question of the existence of the world, and he means to be critical. Is it possible for a question, any question, to remain without a response? Is it possible that the question inheres in response whether or not it is possible for a question to go without a response? That I suspect is true, but to appreciate its truth one must interrogate the way of asking questions, always returning from the constructa to the lived experience, the experience of the question.

Labels: Barbaras, epoché, ideas, language, lifeworld, Merleau-Ponty, questions

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:12 PM. 3 comments

Here are a few highlights of my day yesterday:

• made espresso,




• read the news of the world,

  
  

• played the blues,




• did my calisthenics,




• listened to Elmo Hope,




• ate some red pepper soup,




• read that "[w]ord and subject matter, language and reality, are inseperable, and the limits of our understanding coincide with the limits of our common language. In this sense, there is no 'world in itself' beyond its presence as the subject matter a particular language community. We do not first have an extralinguistic contact with the world and then put this world into the instrumentation of language. To begin by assuming such a schema is to reduce language to the status of a tool, which fails to grasp its all-encompassing, world-constituting significance" (David E. Linge, "Editors Introduction," Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. xxviii-xxix),




• made a quiche.

Not only do I disagree with Linge's premise that language and reality are coextensive, I think he's improperly come to a conclusion about alternatives to his point of view. Language is world-constituting and there are worlds outside of language. Life is more than one activity. If there is a world that belongs to life itself, a lifeworld, there is every reason to assume that it is not coextensive with language.

Labels: Elmo Hope, Gadamer, language, lifeworld, Linge, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:13 AM. 0 comments

Who imagines us? I can't yet permanently dispel the thought of a phantom imagination, an imagination whose function would be to make animal forms. Am I not animated? How has that come about? I don't think I can begin to answer this line of questioning on my own. Irigaray says:

We want to have the entire world in our head, sometimes the entire world in our heart. We do not see that this gesture transforms the life of the world into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life, a life always foreign to us, other than us.

Thus, if we precisely grasp all that makes the springtime, we would without doubt lose the wondrous contemplation in the face of the mystery of springtime growth, we would lose the life, the vitality, in which this universal renewal has us participate without our being able to know or control where the joy, the force, the desire that animate us come from. If we could analyze each element of energy that reaches us in the explosion of spring, we would lose the global state that we experience by bathing in it through all our sense, our whole body, our whole soul.

We sometimes, at least partially, find this state again, I would say this state of grace, in which the spring puts us, when we are immersed in a new landscape, in an extraordinary cosmic manifestation, when we bathe in an environment that is simultaneously perceptible and imperceptible, knowable and unknowable, visible and invisible to us. We are then situated in a milieu, in an event that escapes our control, our know-how, our inventiveness, our imagination. And our response to this "mystery" is or could be astonishment, wonder, praise, sometimes questioning, but not reproduction, repetition, control, appropriation.

(Between East and West, p. 121-122)

Do I believe in a life of the world? Well, not as a precept but I remain open to the possibility. (A life in the world but not of the world must be imagined.) Perhaps believing in the life of the world would be like believing in the life of phenomenality. The horizons in which things appear are certainly not dead as far I can fathom. We might want to object to a reduction of the world to horizons, but if this is yet another way of talking about how the world is lived we might want to expand our own horizons and let the thought be thought through. It may be that the world has a structure of openness, a source of ambiguity worthy of respect. Yet it's difficult for me to sort these two out, life and world. What exactly is meant by saying "life" remains unclear to me; it seems to be said in at least two senses when talking about the life of the world, implying one sense in order to say explicitly another. Perhaps life itself hesitates to settle on a meaning, and the world's openness and the ambiguity we feel in our encounter with the world's openness are echoes of this more primordial hesitation.

In talking about an imagination that escapes imagination I'm playing with at least two senses of imagination. (I'm committed to this play with imagination, possibly at the risk of playing with commitment.) Imagine an imagination that excludes itself and then imagine as its other an imagination that includes itself. Now imagine an imagination that excludes its other and an imagination that includes its other (a thought similar to }∅{, perhaps, or simply the tao of imagination): are these two imaginations one? With respect to Irigaray's thoughts on the life of the world, would an all-inclusive, absolutely or exclusively inclusive imagination lack a necessary power of imagination, a power not to be included? In short, does the power of escape work reflexively? Does the power of escape work both ways and absolutely at the same time? Can I be open to a world that isn't already open? What does it mean to surpass, to transcend? Where do you go when you transcend? Another world? Another imagination?

Labels: Brahma, horizons, imagination, Irigaray, life, lifeworld, Taoism, transcendence, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:44 AM. 4 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

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

Sinthome (of Larval Subjects) has shared with me a paper of his on the phenomonological implications of Lacan's theory of the subject. Lacan's way of thinking does constitute a radical critique because he takes aim directly at the Cartesian subject. Lacan summarizes his approach:

The unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject, at the level at which the subject constitutes himself out of the effects of the signifier. This makes it clear that in the term subject–this is I why I referred it back to its origin–I am not designating the living substratum needed by this phenomenon of the subject, nor any sort of substance, nor any being possessing knowledge in his pathos, his suffering, whether primal or secondary, nor even some incarnated logos, but the Cartesian subject, who appears at the moment when doubt is recognized as certainty–except that, through my approach, the bases of this subject prove to be wider, but, at the same time much more amenable to the certainty that eludes it. This is what the unconscious is.

(Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 126)

Now I have something to say to this, but first I want to clarify what Lacan means when he says that the Cartesian subject appears at the moment of doubt. Lacan writes:

Descartes apprehends his I think in the enunciation of the I doubt, not in its statement, which still bears all of this knowledge to be put in doubt. Shall I say that Freud makes one more step–which designates for us sufficiently the legitimacy of our association–when he invites us to integrate in the text of the dream what I shall call the colophon of doubt–the colophon, in an old text, is that small pointing hand that used to be printed, in the days when we still had typography, in the margin. The colophon of doubt is part of the text. This indicates that Freud places his certainty, his Gewissheit, only in the constellation of signifiers as they result from the recounting, the commentary, the association, even if they are later retracted. Everything provides signifying material, which is what he depends on to establish his own Gewissheit–for I stress that experience begins only with his method. That is why I compare it to the Cartesian method.

(p. 44).

The Cartesian subject emerges in response to a radical doubt. That much seems uncontroversial. If we take the next step and integrate the "colophon of doubt" into the text of the cogito, must we then follow the path Lacan has laid out? Personally I would balk on the grounds that Lacan's understanding of experience is too narrowly logocentric, too exclusively psychoanlytic. Here's a question, then: In Husserlian phenomenology, does the lifeworld signify merely a living substratum of the transcendental ego? Perhaps the answer depends on how we understand what it means to live. My sense is that living should be understood in the broadest sense possible, as open-ended. So the colophon of doubt is not then something that dissappears or is necessarily neglected in phenomenological analysis. There is, however, clearly a problem with the transcendental ego, and Lacanian analysis offers one way to explore that.

Labels: Descartes, experience, Lacan, lifeworld, phenomenology, the unconscious

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:01 PM. 2 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

Patočka's phenomenology of the lifeworld is among the richest I've encountered, though in the present volume he doesn't use that specific term. In these passages Patočka draws heavily from Merleau-Ponty, obviously. The problem itself is of course first outlined by Husserl. I'm especially taken with Patočka's approach to plurality, which recalls my previous reading of Arendt's The Human Condition, esp. vis-a-vis de Laguna's idea of an existential analysis of the natural world. His understanding of plurality somehow seems more factual than Arendt's–though that may simply be becuase his work is closer to me at the moment. Anyway, here are a couple of paragraphs on the lifeworld:

An animal lives in an unceasing immediately relevant relation to its context, in the present, related to something that interests it immediately, affecting it. Humans, by the attitudes they assume, are constantly placing themselves into situations other than the directly present ones, into the past, into the future, with all their quasi-structures–quasi-present, quasi-past, etc. (remembering going into the horizon of the past where a course of life that once had been present is repeated in tokens; we move in the past as if it were present, hence quasi-present), going into imaginary worlds, into the world of reading, of thought sequences, of tasks not met, of duties that place us into a special space which is and yet is not. At the same time we must be always actively localized where we are, integrating ourselves into the now. For us humans, what is immediately present in each moment is also a focus of other possibilities, of partial worlds and so on. What is characteristic of us is our variety of possibilities, a freedom from the present, from the immediately given. Human orientation, that is, is not an orientation in a context. Rather, given the plurality of possibilities thanks to which we are not rooted in only one context like the animal but free with respect to it in virtue of our tangential worlds and half-realities, our living with respect to what we are not is a living in a world, not simply in a context. The animal, by contrast, depends on its context. For that reason, in the case of humans the present is distinct from the immediately given; what is present, directly present, exceeds what is originarily, immediately given. For humans, the directly relevant and the immediately given grow far apart. If the objective pole of lived experience (what we are not) is excessively differntiated, exceeding the immediately given, then the subjective pole–the I–must accordingly have the character of something capable of transcending immediate givenness in its differentiation. It must be that which, in spite of its unity and simplicity, bears variety within it, a variety of possibilities, of modes of diverse relating.

(Body, Community, Language, World, pp 32-33.)

And further, on the topic of horizons: