Sunday, February 07, 2010
While being administered a Wechsler IQ test I balked during a task of placing numbers and letters in sequence when the same number was given to me twice. Is the intelligent answer "1,2,5,8, b,f,h,r,t, or "1,2,5,5,8 b,f,h,r,t"? I became preoccupied with my problem of repetition. Does anybody else have a problem with repetition, I wondered. Am I afflicted by an abnormality of thinking, an inability to process repetition that causes symptoms of mental confusion, or, indeed, actually confounds me in a way that nobody else could clearly understand but merely diagnose? What am I at this moment bewildered by repetition? How is it possible to go on thinking at all?
Kangas writes (citations omitted):
If at any moment repetition were allowed to occur, the very idea of repetition, a movement "by virtue of the absurd," beyond representation, would be annihilated. Repetition is essentially deferred. To think repetition can therefore occur only by means of an even greater thinking of its difficulty, at a limit, its impossibility. Thinking repetition takes shape as a continual stepping back from the present and self-presence to the point where freedom—whose "supreme interest" is repetition—discovers its destitution, in the ordeal. To think is to arrive ever again at the point where though discovers an abyss (vibrations, rotations, whirlings) and freedom finds itself ungrounded. Thinking proceeds up to what cannot be thought.
(p. 123)
Labels: Kangas, Kierkegaard, measurement, noesis, repetition
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Claude Hagège hypothesizes a monogenetic origin of a faculty for speech but a polygenetic origin of human languages (The Dialogic Species: A Linguistic Contribution to the Social Sciences, trans. Sharon L. Shelley, Columbia University Press, Second Edition, 1990). I'm not certain the radical critique of universal grammar requires an evolutionary argument (in fact I reckon Hagège's radical critique is born of patient, close study of diverse living languages), but here is one:
We have seen that all evidence indicates virtual simultaneity of the birth of the species and the ancient migrations. Moreover, we can better sketch this vast adventure if we keep in mind the difference between the notions of speech faculty (langage) and language (langue). Through a continuing series of improvements, the first more or less coded stammerings became regular formations; their repertories extended as the aptitude to symbolize became enriched with the more specific faculty of articulating thought in ordered signs expressed by combinations of sounds. But such an evolution itself assumes a considerable period of time and thus cannot have produced human languages in the contemporary sense of the term, until after the great migrations. Thus, in all likelihood, this process took place in several different geographical areas. The ecological milieu, nature and its sounds, vegetable and animal species as well as the sound phenomena they produced, were therefore quite diverse. Diverse also, in each living biocenosis (or community of interdependent beings), were the nuclei of social organization which were constituted, and, consequently, the first languages themselves. For, from the beginning, they were closely affiliated with these social organizations, although it is true that this relationship was gradually obscured by the progressive and arbitrary conventions that separate words and phrase structures from their original sources.
(pp. 7-8)
For Hagège the origination of languages is closely tied to a capacity for thought; articulating abstract thought through vocal signs is a vital function of language above and beyond any residue of its sensory-motor aspects. He presents the view that the neocortical elaboration of Homo and of sapiens in particular precedes the development of languages. (Reportedly the neocortex ratio for humans "is about 50% larger than the maximum value for any other primate species" (Robin Dunbar, Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans.); of course the encephalization quotient of sapiens is also remarkably high; see the lecture notes of Bill Sellers, Primate Brains).
Labels: Claude Hagège, glottogenesis, humans, language, noesis, peregrinations
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Nachmanovitch says, "Bricolage implies what mathematicians like to call 'elegance,' that is, such an economy of statement that a single line of thought has a great many implications and outcomes" (Free Play, p. 86). Does this line of thought have consequences for our thinking about causality? Are there spheres of play or creativity completely divorced from causality? (And isn't there the argument that suchlike divorce is essential to causality? Is this any less a statement about the given that it is about causality?) As ever it seems I'm uncertain about the ontic status of the cause. Does the cause have many outcomes? Does the cause implicate the way the metaphor implicates—by what rights would one say that metaphor doesn't implicate conversationally? What is the ontic status of a maxim of manner? Should I say *maxim of manner?
Labels: bricolage, causality, Nachmanovitch, noesis
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Ape Gestures and Language Evolution, by Amy Pollick and Frans B. M. de Waal. From the discussion of the results:
Our data strongly support the gestural flexibility hypothesis according to which our closest primate relatives use brachiomanual gestures more flexibly across contexts than they do facial expressions and vocalizations. Gestures seem less closely tied to particular emotions, such as aggression or affiliation, hence possess a more adaptable function. Gestures are also evolutionarily younger, as shown by their presence in apes but not monkeys, and likely under greater cortical control than facial/vocal signals (see Introduction). This observation makes gesture a serious candidate modality to have acquired symbolic meaning in early hominins. As such, the present study supports the gestural origin hypothesis of language.
Labels: apes, bonobos, chimpanzees, cortex, de Waal, evolution, gesture, humans, language, noesis, Pollick
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Assailably: thought coheres with the eidos of bodily movements; the power of thought and the power of the body congrue like music because one is simply a mode of the other; to think is to live, to experience life in physical movements, to journey through the living physique and its habitat; thinking is one with life. I'd like to briefly challenge that idea, the last formulation in particular. Ong alleges that human knowledge (what might that human mean?) emerges from time, and he says, nicely to my ear, "[l]yric poetry implies a series of events in which the voice in the lyric is embedded or to which it is related. All of this is to say that knowledge and discourse come out of human experience and that the elemental way to process human experience verbally is to give an account of it more or less as it really comes into being and exists, embedded in the flow of time" (Orality, p. 140). Suggestive. But let's keep a watch on this concept of flow. An allowance for interruption.
Ong says, displaying his knack for the apophthegmatic, "the experience of real life is more like a string of episodes than it is like a Freytag pyramid" (p. 148). So real-life human experience is embedded in the flow of time and it is rather like a string of episodes, of additional entrances, additional ways of coming into. Now, according to Ong, it is not the episodic which heightens consciousness, or congrues with heightened consciousness, but rather it is the literary narrative adhering to the Freytag pyramid that congrues with conscious thinking, with heightened consciousness in particular (p. 151). The episodic has then only to do with the unconscious?!? (Well, sometimes we need to deploy superstitions in order to be critical; we need to engage the imagination in dialectic exercise.) This doesn't add up for me. Knowledge emerges from time, but consciousness is at a distance from the episodic, the form of narrative time most consistent with lived experience. In an important respect Ong holds that thinking is culturally constrained, that people think according to the dictates of a noetic economy, an economy we experience as structured by technologies of the word, which might imply the force of something like the unconscious, or, better in my view, the nonthematic elements of consciousness; yet in his view the effects of culture are not equal, particularly with respect to the "freeing" of consciousness. (For Ong the life of the mind in a literate noetic economy is at once constrained by technology and free in a sense that could be imagined as free and elaborated culturally (only a free, conscious intellect could imagine the conditions of its freedom, which is thereby put into question). The literate's intellectual life is both enriched and impoverished, in touch with the experience of thinking and alienated: contradictions which I reckon are brought to the analysis rather than emerging from careful study.) It may be worth noting that I don't regard the physique of the animal to be "natural" in a sense of existing apart from, or having existed before, consciousness. Further, if the episodic feels natural I wouldn't jump from the recognition of this feeling to the conclusion that episodic thought must be more primordial, elementary, lower, or any less transcendental (whatever that could mean) than thought which might appear in a certain aspect to be out of touch with the episodic.
I'll preface these next few comments by saying that I am skeptical of silent voices, though the topic interests me, and I have spoken of inner voices (not without some modicum of skepticism, I hope ("Why believe that inner speech points to silence instead of the possibility of conversations yet to be realized?")). "Outside drama, in narrative as such, the original voice of the oral narrator took on various new forms when it became the silent voice of the writer, as the distancing effected by writing invited various fictionalizations of the decontextualized reader and writer. . . . But, until print appeared and eventually had its fuller effects, the voice's allegiance to episode always remained firm" (p. 148). Is the silent voice then also a fictionalization, just a metaphor? How distant is any thought from life? No thought could be more distant from life on Earth than Walter J. Ong himself, yet here is a book open to his thoughts. Incredible. However, as I've argued in a similar vein, Ong's thoughts must be read to become thoughts once again, proper thoughts; they must be embodied by a reader. How distant is this embodiment from living? (That's not a rhetorical question.) Perhaps there's a mode of embodiment that isn't life itself, an idea we should contemplate if only to be clear about what we mean by saying "life" or "body." A convolution: to even have a concept of the body is to stand at–thus to embody–a distance from life.
Labels: body, inner speech, life, narrative, noesis, Ong, temporality
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Ong says, "Not only communication but thought itself relates in an altogether special way to sound" (Orality and Literacy, p. 7). Ong may be at odds with Cavarero in that he doesn't believe philosophy is possible except in the context of chirographic culture, and that condition may involve for him an acknowledgment and acceptance of some limitations on philosophical thought that Cavarero would rather lead us to revolt against. Broadly, we would be happier if we allowed ourselves to imagine a philosophical style of thinking that related in an altogether special way to sound, a philosophy whose departures from everyday thinking didn't do violence to this special relation to sound, which we have yet to explore, a rhythmosophy, a choreosophy, no stranger to love, in step with egalitarianism and the way things come and go. (Should philosophy make us happy?)
Labels: Cavarero, eudaimonia, noesis, Ong, sound
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Agamben says, in Form of Life:
I call thought the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life. I do not mean by this the individual exercise of an organ of a psychic faculty, but rather an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence. To think does not mean merely to be affected by this or that thing, by this or that content of enacted thought, but rather at once to be affected by one's own receptiveness and experience in each and every thing that is thought a pure power of thinking. ("When thought has become each thing in the way in which a man who actually knows is said to do so. . . its condition is still one of potentiality. . . and thought is then able to think of itself.")
Rancière comments, "Lyotard contends that the task of the avant-garde is to isolate art from cultural demand so that it may testify all the more starkly to the heteronomy of thought" (The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy, p. 134).
Improbably the plus one, as in "infinity plus one," will be revealed as something other than thought.
Labels: Agamben, induction, Lyotard, multitudes, noesis, Rancière
Monday, December 08, 2008
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that incognitive means "destitute of the faculty of cognition; unable to take cognizance." In speaking of "the incognitive question" the question arises whether one can question in such a way as to, momentarily to be sure, make oneself unable to take cognizance. Still more deeply there is the question of whether taking cognizance requires us to relinquish the question, if it is indeed possible to hold onto the question in the first place. I think this notion of the incognitive question is perfectly logical, but I know it doesn't appear that way to everybody. Let me propose then an experiment to test whether it makes sense to speak of an incognitive question.
When I first approached the imaginary question I was led to imagine a question by making a gesture of questioning. I'd like you to enact a nonthought experiment along these lines. You may not need to make any gesture. You may find that the breath alone is enough to guide your incognitive passage through the question–oh, I've begged the question; just try to separate the posing of the question from thought and pay attention to what happens to your thinking. You may feel called by the question into gesture. If so, go with it. Study that process too. In the simplest terms just try to pose a question without using words.
No doubt thought isn't coextensive with language, language isn't coextensive with words, nor words with concepts, and the possibility of momentarily and/or partially decoupling questioning from cognition doesn't imply that cognition and questioning are, in the round, decoupled. We must be cautious in our interpretations of the results we have obtained. The conditions of the experiment must be considered. Minimally I hope this little nonthought experiment indicates that there is some phenomenon of consciousness being discussed in my use of phrases like "the phraseology of the incognitive question." The posture that doesn't quite pose–throughout this discussion I will pretend not to have read Vallega-Neu's The Bodily Dimension in Thinking chiefly because I haven't yet found the opportunity to actually do so–the expression that presses without rising to stand out of the pression, the vehicle that never delivers its tenor–I won't be caught equating metaphor's pure vehicle, which perhaps appears only in experimental conditions, with the senseless. The incognitive question has horizons, orientations. Attend to your breathing. Sustain the incognitive question as long as you can, weave a coherence into the posing of the incognitive question while attending to your breathing, bring all of your skills at making phrases to bear on the posing of the incognitive question all the while making observations of your conduct. Well, perhaps I am speaking of the *question, or the question as it belongs to *language; if so any ambition to explore the question apart from a logomachic culture would have to be questioned, a questioning I may well have invited when I asked you to perform this little nonthought experiment. Play along.
Sooner or later I will have to look at the relation between the question and the expectation. Possibly the incognitive question traffics in blind expectations, the sense of which might be determined under experimental conditions.
Labels: noesis, nonthought, questions
Monday, November 24, 2008
Although I pretend to be a skeptic of sorts, I tend not to doubt but to accept as evident experiential phenomena, including both what classical Pyrrhonian skepticism would classify as phenomena and also noetic experiences. For instance I don't initially doubt a phenomenon of the instant question. ("Is the instant question skeptical?" represents an instant question, if not a very good one–there's the rub.) Of course I have questions. They follow, and I am attitudinally open to examining how phenomena manifest themselves. However, I don't doubt that I can experience something worth calling "an instant question," if only provisionally. I feel that there is some tension between the instant question and a careful program of inquiry, but, provisionally, again, I'd like to set out something called "the experience of inquiry" and see whether there is one kind of experience, or field of experience at play, or whether, in a similar vein, we can investigate something called "the phenomenon of the question," the question phenomenon. In other words, in posing the question of the instant question the aim is to expose beliefs, even beliefs which might only be felt rather than stated explicitly at the start, that may be blocking an inquiry into the phenomenon of the question. (Is this a topic for skepticism whether or not it leads to ataraxia? It would be idiotic to think that skepticism doesn't have topics, but far be it from me to preclude the idiotic. Eh, who knows?)
The Sceptical [Pyrrhonian] persuasion, then, is also called Investigative, from its activity in investigating and inquiring; Suspensive, from the feeling that comes about in the inquirer after the investigation; Aporetic, either (as some say) from the fact that it puzzles over and investigates everything, or else from its being at a loss whether to assert or deny; and Pyrrhonian, from the fact that Pyrrho appears to us to have attached himself to Scepticism more systematically and conspicuously than anyone before him. . . . Scepticism is an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgment and afterwards to tranquillity.
(Sextus Empiricus, Outline of Scepticism, I, 4, 4, IN Adrian Kuzminski, Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism , Lexington Books, 2008, p. 6)
Kuzminski expresses the opinion that Pyrrhonism should not be thought of as a skepticism, because skepticism has come to mean, principally, the impossibility of inquiry. I disagree, siding with Sextus Empiricus. (I will also be consulting Patrick's Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism on this topic and David Bruzina's Master's thesis, Sextus Empiricus and the Skeptic’s Beliefs (pdf.), but the point here is a simple one of fairness in criticism.) It is the critic of skepticism who is intellectually obligated to understand what "skeptic" means, and to refrain from mischaracterizing various thinkers who identify themselves as skeptics, including those who quite logically identify themselves as being both skeptics and Pyrrhonists. A skeptic is primarily "one who seeks carefully," and secondarily one who is thoughtful or reflective about knowledge (Cf. the Liddel-Scott entry for σκέπτομαι). This is far from saying that Kuzminski has nothing to teach us in making the distinction. I will return in later posts to the theme of whether having as a goal of inquiry ataraxia or any form of living emancipation from suffering that cannot easily be characterized as knowledge might nevertheless be wise, a concept which also stems from looking around, carefully (that is, before it becomes signaling a way; I may always place making a way, or waying, before the Way, and of course I leave that judgment open to question, as I provisionally leave open the possibility of a non-dogmatic, post-Academic, aporetic enlencticism). Speaking for my own way of being skeptical, I will not refrain from investigating my investigative persuasion, though I insist that there are many steps involved, and, as an aside almost, I wonder why emancipation should require investigation, that is, careful inquiry. Is there an abiding episteme of the free? Of happiness? Is care primarily an epistemological method?
Speaking of asides, in Julio Médem's Lovers of the Artic Circle, Otto's primary school teacher claims that eight-year-old brains pose 33 questions per hour. Any clues as to the provenance of that idea, or any similar study of how many questions children pose per hour? Should the process that children go through in becoming adults be our best model for what learning means? (Do we miss grasping what it is that children do when they learn by employing a model of how children become other than themselves, a model perhaps implied by a bourgeois saying of "child"?) (What's the sphere of becoming of the question?) Is the careful question born of the same activity as the instant question? How can the careful inquiry completely turn its back on the instant question? Is it the child who turns his back on the instant question? Next floor: trick questions, returns, the phenomenality of incognitive questions, the automatic "is tranquility bothered by the automatic question?" question–how? (Does that "How?" contribute to the forming of a belief about the thought of the automatic "is tranquility bothered by the automatic question?" question? How? (Should I have rewritten and asked how first, placing a thought about a thought before the writing of a thought?) You see, evidently there is something for me to learn by making a study of Pyrrhonism.)
Labels: charity, David Bruzina, Kuzminski, Mary Mills Patrick, noesis, phenomena, Pyrrho, questions, Sextus Empiricus, skepticism, soteriology
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Every word I set before me violates the thinking I want to venture, thinking I ask you to take up, knowing all too well that in asking I present you with a dilemma. To talk about loneliness is to disturb loneliness. Loneliness makes itself difficult to talk about, and, concomitantly, difficult to talk to. Its withdrawal is complete. Look. Already I've offended it. Is this reticence the only recourse loneliness has against thought? Is that the problem, that loneliness not only does not want to be spoken to, but that it does not want to be thought, not even in loneliness, not even in being desolate, in being able to say, in full conviction, "I am desolate." Cruel loneliness, because it's also the case that to be lonely is to be alone with one's thoughts.
I am forsaken. Wonder flees from the things of this world. The trees refuse understanding. Has wonder taken refuge in solitude? Solitude. I should hesitate to think that loneliness would be content to die in its own arms. Loneliness does not say "contentment" on its own. Yet neither does the impulse to fly into another's arms arise from loneliness alone. Such an impulse, with respect to loneliness, can only be a response. Loneliness doesn't do responses. Perhaps a philosophy of loneliness could only be like an invitation to a dialogue that couldn't be refused because it couldn't be responded to, an invitation as if from the dead.
Appearance disappears as appearance, disappearance behind disappearance. Loneliness remains as an unknown–I ask that we resist thinking that we know what the unknown represents in order to appreciate the dilemma of loneliness, to contemplate the dilemma of loneliness a moment, just one moment, before discussing it. When I say "I know loneliness" I believe I'm speaking honestly, yet at the moment I can honestly say "I don't know loneliness." It resists being known. Does it merely resist being the object of a thought, destined for speech, perhaps, or does it resist knowledge as such? It has occurred to me that loneliness can only be known as a dilemma. That would mean, however, that loneliness would be open to being philosophically exposed as a dilemma, as an unknown that we can all remember, despite its turning its back on discourse. Could loneliness then only be approachable through philosophy? Not all discourses are equal. It needs to be said. Does loneliness preliminarily refuse every discourse, or just those directed at it? Those directed at exposing it as contradiction? Those may be the least able to speak to loneliness. At the same time, I feel that its contradiction, its stance against saying, means something.
Loneliness has a world, but it is an empty world. I risk contradicting myself. "Loneliness doesn't do responses." Yet its inwardness could be seen as a response to an emptying of the world, or to another movement of discourse away from a soul that has the auxiliary effect–loneliness doesn't do auxiliary, it would isolated from that effect–of emptying the world. I hesitate to note a difference between the manifestation of loneliness and the existence of loneliness if only because, in setting loneliness before consciousness in this way, in treating it as a thing that can be set before us, we risk talking about something else instead of loneliness, risk losing it in our very approach. Nevertheless I feel that loneliness wants to be talked about, that perhaps its suppression holds a secret to centuries of conversation. I see symptoms of a desolation, symptoms of a powerful it, though I may perhaps find that loneliness is first experienced as happening to me, or even as purely me happening to me. (Apparently now I am speaking of events in an inner world, an inner stage, and yet....) How do I feel about being separated from loneliness? Do my feelings about loneliness matter if they appear in an empty world?
Fragile, irrefragable loneliness–I've already said too much.
Labels: dialogue, loneliness, noesis, philosophy, solitude
Monday, July 16, 2007
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
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Chris points to the latest from
Michael Tomasello et al.,
A New Look at Infant Pointing (
pdf). The nub of the claim being made is this:
Pointing is a special gesture functionally in that directing someone's attention to something does not convey a specific meaning in the manner of most conventionalized, symbolic gestures. Rather, pointing can convey an almost infinite variety of meanings by saying, in effect, "If you look over there, you'll know what I mean". To recover the intended meaning of a pointing gesture, therefore, requires some fairly serious "mindreading".
(p. 3)
Tomasello et al. call their perspective the cognitively rich interpretation of infant pointing, in contrast to the cognitively lean interpretation which they criticize. I haven't yet decided whether they make the case.
One idea that jumps out at me is the notion that infant pointing is "prelinguistic." Is infant pointing prelinguistic in the same way that babble is prelinguistic? Perhaps that depends on one's interpretation of babble. Is babble destined toward speech? Is pointing? Yet surely infancy has some meaning, i.e. an inability to speak. In either case, there is some evidence that social awareness and noesis are displayed in human infancy prior to the acquisition of language.
Maybe I'm jumping the gun. What can we really know about the noetic faculty of infants? And so how clear then is the idea of social awareness? Does it involve something like mindreading? For Tomasello et al. we need to know why somebody is pointing to something in order to genuinely communicate with the pointer (p. 7). Assuming this is true, how do we gain this knowledge? Is it simply by looking and suddenly realizing what is meant? Do we need something like a "theory" of other minds, a theory of mental agency, or is it enough to have an understanding of a person, an agency? The question here is whether mind-body dualism is a natural aspect of communication, or whether it is a bias introduced by investigators. Would a nondualistic interpretation of infant pointing resemble a cognitively lean interpretation, or is it really neither here nor there? (Am I missing the point?) In any event I think it's fascinating that we can know something about the cognitive abilities of infants, even if it's not settled in my mind how exactly we can interpret the facts of infant pointing.
Labels: infant, joint attention, noesis, sociality, Tomasello
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Merleau-Ponty considers the ratio of monologue to dialogue in early childhood language:
Perhaps, as Piaget has suggested, one could introduce a new level of development after the age of five. Up to that point the child does not seek to communicate with others (dialogue) as much as to talk by himself (monologue). Speech, as a mode of social communication, does not gain importance until the child is seven or eight years old.
(Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, p. 20)
After reviewing a couple of sources, including David and Rosa Katz's Conversations with Children, Merleau-Ponty weighs in against this view of distinct monological and dialogical stages of development. All of the possibilities of language, for dialogue as well as monologue, are, from the very beginning, "inscribed in the expressive manifestations of the child. There is never anything absolutely new, but there are anticpations, regressions, and retentions of older elements in new form" (p. 21). He concludes that "the child appropriates linguistic Gestalten, general structures, neither by an intellectual effort nor by an immediate imitiation" (p. 21).
A new wrinkle has been added to a question that arose from my reading of Cavarero: how is monologue possible? Does monologue have its own Gestalt, or is it more freely a variation of the possibility of speech? Assume for a moment that there is a Gestalt for monologue. If the self is foregrounded in monologue, what is the shape of its horizon? Is the other foregrounded in dialogue, or does the foreground shift in dialogue between self and other? How exactly can we begin to describe the difference between the two Gestalten?
Finally, what does it mean to say that no intellectual effort is required for the acquisition of these Gestalten? Merleau-Ponty seems to be suggesting that human consciousness comes pre-equipped for language, and yet again he claims that these structures are appropriated. From where? And how, if not by intellectual effort? Not by assuefaction? Is monologue (or dialogue) something that we learn at all? Is there no interface between the noetic faculty and the acquisition of language, or is the exercise of the noetic faculty limited to certain functions like the grasping of the sign relation?
Labels: assuefaction, Cavarero, development, Gestalt, Merleau-Ponty, monologue, noesis, speech
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Cavarero asks us to think of uniqueness as "an understanding [un'intesa] and as a reciprocal dependence" (p. 182). The latter term suggests what Cavarero might mean by "understanding," but I'd like to begin by asking what kind of understanding is possible in the absence of consciousness, for Cavarero's privileging of speech over thought in the logos comes with a hearty dose of antipathy toward nous. She writes of a phenomenology of the voice, yet there is no place in her phenomenology for a conscious subject. Mouths communicate with ears and the recognition of vocal uniqueness occurs spontaneously, as if by magic. "The phenomenology of speaking possesses an autonomous status in which the relationality of mouths and ears comes to the fore" (p. 174). By "autonomous" Cavarero means autonomous with respect to thought, that speaking isn't merely the acoustic manifestation of thinking. She intends to give back flesh and bone back to the subject, but unlike the phenomenologies of Patočka, Herny or Merleau-Ponty, she has not elaborated a notion of bodily awareness–actually she sort of does have such a notion, but it comes in bits and pieces. For example she says that the "ear distinguishes sound and knows it to be human not only because it vibrates in the specifically human element of speech, but also because the ear percieves its uniqueness" (p. 178). Whereas Cavarero portrays the communication between mouths and ears of others as direct and instantaneaous, she cuts out of the picture altogether communication between the ears and mouth of a conscious subject. There is nothing to explain the unity of the mouth and ears, no explanation of how the knowledge that the ear possesses pertains to the mouth of a hearing subject or anything other than the ear.
Speaking of Levinas' ontology of the face-to-face, Cavarero says that "[r]ather than the atemporal dimension of a lasting permanence, the face to face evokes a discontinuous becoming, characterized by the ever-new 'present' of the 'nows' in which the gazes intersect" (p. 177). While reciprocity is sometimes an attribute of the gaze, Cavarero argues it always an attribute of the voice. "[T]he voice is always, irremediably relational" (p. 177). In one manner of speaking, relationality is not a contingency but a necessary condition of a kind of understanding. To make this argument was it necessary to dethrone to nous? I see two steps that had to be taken: (1) the critique of atemporality, or presence, which Cavarero sees as a property claimed for nous; and (2) a decentering of understanding. I don't see how the complete obliteration of a noetic faculty makes sense in this context, though I will admit that this is not the kindest reading of Cavarero, and what I am really after is settling a question in my own mind as to how understanding is possible.
Labels: body, Cavarero, noesis, plurality, reciprocity, uniqueness
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Arendt comes down against concluding on the basis of our experience of the noetic faculty, especially in dreams, that there exist things in themesleves which exist in the same way that we exist in a world of appearances (Life of the Mind, Vol. 1,p. 44). She says further:
[E]lementary logical mistakes are quite rare in the history of philosophy; what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as "meaningless" are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose existence is determined by appearance. Hence, in our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.
(p. 45)
For my part, I don't reckon that the dreaming ego under normal conditions is a good proxy for the thinking ego. I'll definitely be rereading Binswanger's "Dream and Existence" as I wrap my mind around this one.
Labels: Arendt, dreaming, noesis, thinking
Sunday, October 01, 2006
I'm going to leave off pretending to criticize Grassi, since my every objection to his argument is met with some sort of answer further on. One point though did strike me about his interpretation of Longinus' On the Sublime: How do we interpret the idea that the power to concieve great thoughts, i.e. noesis, is for the most part natural? Grassi prefers the term "aboriginal" to translate "authigenés," though if one chooses the term "innate," as many translators have, it should be taken in the sense that "nature (understood as phuein, as birth and development) is the capacity of becoming manifest, as it appears in plants, animals and human language, revealing something completely new" (p.67). Now this is the funny thing about humans. They're most notable natural endowment isn't so much something they're born with–though they do have awfully big brains–as it is something that develops over time. What do we say of a being whose essence continuously unfolds?
Grassi has a lot to say about the ontological difference, that is, the difference between individual beings and being qua being. I don't. My gut feeling is that if starting with an existential being is not an adequate way to understand being, then what passes for being doesn't really need to be understood. It's probably just smoke and mirrors. However I see no reason not to ground ontology on what actually exists –I'm not really exercising my noetic faculty here; it's just my gut.
Labels: Grassi, humans, Longinus, noesis, ontology