Fido the Yak

The presence of the listener is inscribed in the utterance. It is I who speaks, Jacques says, but we who say. He asks, "What happens to the philosophical status of the person if we replace the individual's cogito with the proposition 'I speak, but we say'? (Difference and Subjectivity, p. 9) For one thing the refutation of "I do not exist" becomes problematic.

But should we allow such a distinction between speaking and saying? Is there a speaking that says nothing, a babble that isn't somehow destined for language? Is there an impersonal babble? Perhaps. Perhaps necessarily.

What of the inscription of the presence of the listener in the utterance? This echoes an idea of the intertextuality of the utterance while at the same time it responds to Buber, to a sense of that everything in discourse is affected by relations between the I and the you. The listener is not merely referred to but is there in the interlocutive event. Present. We won't shy away from the idea. It's difficult. How do we describe the presence of the listener? How does the listener appear? As the "other side of language," i.e., perhaps it need not be apparent at all? As an ethical constraint? Imperative? Does the listener present us with an imperative for coherence, for example?

Labels: babble, cogito, dialogism, Jacques, listening, personhood

posted by Fido the Yak at 4:55 AM. 4 comments

The breach ( }∅{ ) evokes the destiny of the person–a chaosmic evocation–without ever saying definitively what that means. It speaks asymptotically to infinitions. The syncopation of infinitions, empirically attestable, finds its way through the breach. Rhythmosophy is the style of inquiry that prepares to both listen for and respond to asymptotic destinies. Rhythmosophy is one of the disciplines which illuminates only insofar as the person is integral to its guiding organon.

Labels: dogma, improvisation, insomnia, method, misreading, personhood

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:38 AM. 7 comments

Barbaras comments on Merleau-Ponty's "The Philosopher and His Shadow," his own commentary on his reading of Husserl:

His approach to the history of philosophy is the heir of his philosophy of perception and intersubjectivity: just as the thing is not frontally and objectively possessed but rather grasped in transcendence in a lateral way, the thought of an author is not such that one can make a precise list of what belongs to it and what it has ignored. The relation of commentary is a modality of the intersubjective relation, of linguistics in particular. In dialogical experience, I do not communicate to another a thought possessed elsewhere. I think with him and make myself in his image; moreover, his thought comes to itself only be formulating itself and offering itself to me, so that there is no clear-cut distinction between what would belong strictly to an author and what the interpretation projects into the author. What defines a thought is what is was still seeking to say, its "unthought," which can be revealed only in a reflection which, on the basis of its difference, turns itself into the echo of the thought. Therefore, the rejection of the idea that one must subject a reading to objectivity in favor of the idea that one must attempt to explicate an unthought can be a higher form of fidelity.

(Being, p. 69)

I think with him and make myself in his image. Merleau-Ponty says, "I borrow myself from others; I create others from my own thoughts. This is no failure to perceive others; it is the perception of others" (159). The quotidian personalistic attitude towards the world, which we hope to be able to understand rhythmosophically, via reductions by a method of improvisatory rhythmic variation, does not in the first place imagine other people as other minds and then more or less as an addendum supply bodies and a sense of concrete material horizons to the image of the other. There is no constituting of a mind for a mind but of a person for a person. We imagine whole persons. If we were to follow Merleau-Ponty's lead, we'd find that the body, in particular, its status as "the viniculum of self and things" (p. 166), holds the key to grasping the intersubjective dimension of the personalistic imagination. On the model of touch, physical and personal at once, "[t]he physical thing becomes animate. Or, more precisely, it remains what it was (the event does not enrich it), but an exploratory power comes to rest upon or dwell in it" (ibid., my emphasis). If we grasp such an exploratory power through the grasp of the experience of our own free hands, are we thus employing a metonymic relation necessarily mediated by explicit cognitions? The question is that of imagining the whole person. Merleau-Ponty uses the example of shaking hands as a knowledge of the other, reasoning:

[W]e have here neither comparison, nor analogy, nor projection or "introjection." The reason why I have evidence of the other man's being-there when I shake his hand is that his hand is substituted for my left hand, and my body annexes the body of another person in that "sort of reflection" it is paradoxically the seat of. My two hands "coexist" and are "compresent" because they are one single body's hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality. For Husserl the experience of others is first of all "esthesiological," and must be if the other person exists effectively and not as the ideal terminus or fourth term of a proportion which supposedly would come to complete my consciousness' relationships to my objective body and his. What I perceive to begin with is a different "sensibility" (Empfindbarkeit), and only subsequently a different man and a different thought.

(p. 168)

The ability to feel, the exploratory power of the other person: these are vitally of the tactile; one almost has the sense reading these words that the whole person is composited from an imagination that is primarily sensual, rather than being abstracted from ways of being a person, sensuous, embodied, but irreducible to any single faculty, ability or organ. "Other persons. . . . are not there as minds, as "psychisms," but such for example as we face them in anger or love–faces, gestures, spoken words to which our own respond without thoughts intervening, to the point that we sometimes turn their words back upon them even before they have reached us, as surely as, more surely than, if we had understood–each one of us pregnant with the others and confirmed by them in his body" (p. 181). Well, here are some words I find difficult to absorb (which means I'll get back to them in some fashion, perhaps through Barbaras once again):

"Animalia are realities which cannot be given in a fundamental and original presence to several subjects; they enclose subjectivities. They are the very special sort of objects which are fundamentally and originally given in such a way that they presuppose fundamental and original presences without being able to be given in a fundamental and original presence themselves." This is what animalia and men are: absolutely present beings who have a wake of the negative. A perceiving body that I see is also a certain absence that is hollowed out and tactfully dealt with behind that body by its behavior. But absence is itself rooted in presence; it is through his body that the other person's soul is soul in my eyes. "Negativities" also count in the sensible world, which is decidedly the universal one.

(p. 172)

Imagine that instead of simply carrying a wake of the negative as some necessary property or attribute, the person essentially puts negativity into play in the form of irrealizations which matter in the sensible world. So let's get back to this idea of making myself in the image of the other. I imagine meontically rather than mimetically, or, better said, the image of the image does not originate in mimesis, which nevertheless runs parallel with some kinds of thinking. Further, there is a methectic aspect to my irrealizations of animalia, one might even speak of an intermethexis. I can discern the interpersonal as a horizon of imagination, yet the image of the image eludes my grasp. It is not there fully for me. Not to too quickly shirk responsibility, but are these thoughts then by which I create others my own?

Labels: Barbaras, body, dialogism, Husserl, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, personhood, reading

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:07 AM. 3 comments

If we pose methexis as an alternative to mimesis how do we account for spontaneity? Conceivably it doesn't fall on the side of methexis. Levinas tells us that representation is itself pure spontaneity, a thought which is by no means self-explanatory (Totality, p. 125). Let's see how Levinas talks about representation and, in particular, the temporal qualities of representation, because if we can make sense of what he is saying in these respects we will have some foothold on his equation of spontaneity with representation. (I've proffered a defense of spontaneity already; now, as a sort of rejoinder, we need to refine our understanding of representation.)

Levinas sees in representation, against expectations, the power to repeat the event of enjoyment, which is to be understood not as an involvement but as a break (p. 123). This implies to me that something like a whole person takes part in representation, whole enough for enjoyment, though one step away from involvement. However, for Levinas, the whole person who ages has no place in representation, or, rather, the temporality of such a person who represents is put on hold for the sake of a repetition which also means a step into eternity, a repetition that is foremost a break.

At the very moment of representation the I is not marked by the past but utilizes it as a represented and objective element. Illusion? Ignorance of its own involvements? Representation is the force of such an illusion and of such forgettings. Representation is a pure present. The positing of a pure present without even tangential ties with time is the marvel of representation. It is a void of time, interpreted as eternity.

(p. 125, Levinas' emphases)

So mimesis does not simply oppose methexis so much as it erases it, avoids the participatory, wipes away all traces of past involvements in the present while still it returns to them. And yet–this is surprising–in Levinas' account the unfolding of representation is sonorous rather than visual, a modality suggestive of both ongoing methectic entanglement and, less surely, enjoyment.

The "I think" is the pulsation of rational thought. . . . The subject that thinks by representation is a subject that hearkens to its own thought: one has to think of thought as in an element analogous to sound and not to light. Its own spontaneity is a surprise for the subject, as though despite its full mastery qua I the I surprised what was taking place. The inspiration [génialité] is the very structure of representation: a return in the present thought to the thought's past, an assuming of this past in the present, a going beyond this past and this present–as in the Platonic reminiscence, in which the subject hoists himself up to the eternal. The particular I is one with the same, coincides with the "daemon" that speaks to it in thought, and is universal thought. . . .Universal thought is always a thought in the first person.

(p. 126, Levinas' emphasis)

Is eternity broken off from any putative pulsation of the cosmos? Where does pulsation come from once even tangential ties to time have been broken off? Does enjoyment have its own separate vibe? And inner speech? I have a doubt about whether my inner voice coincides with me, the person of universal thought, a person who would have to be appreciably acosmic yet alive in their own vibration–no, not their own vibration, this is precisely what is in question. Who among the living will answer for the pulsation of thought? Is this something we just pick up on, or do we relate to it more ingeniously? Do we ingeniously talk to our inner voice? Alternatively, if we can, from a position of analytical subjectivity, wipe out a cosmos of the inner voice, the power of an illusion, of a return, yet still recognize it as a voice, the unsaid in every saying, how will we make a space for the acknowledgment of its singularity? Would such an acknowledgment be like breaking off a time, interpreted as eternity, for the enjoyment of time? Arguably the singularity of the inner voice needed no acknowledgment but was, despite its being an inner voice, already plain as day. And time never needed to be made personal, but always existed through the sonorous as well as hyperspherically. (A tangent? No doubt. But it is Levinas who said "pulsation" and not without reason–it remains to us ask what kind of activity pulsation represents, whether it is anything like a continuation, or its opposite, and how we should measure it.) Imagine the peripherality of time's reaches, if we can finally risk a personification. Instead of making a break from time that would run contrary to methexis, mimesis repeats a movement into the periphery of time. Such movements can be described as unfolding hyperspherically–the concept time merely reminding us that the person's full range of movement extends into many dimensions. Insofar as mimesis presents itself as a locus of all points, the very pulse of the cogito, it would have to be regarded as delusional. We can't be sure, however, that mimesis will follow this rule, that it won't ever lapse into perfect clarity. Methexis and mimesis may be rhtymosophically homeomorphic, but we must concede a difference: whereas methexis participates roundly in the hyperspherical ballet of existence, mimesis jets into the peripherality of movement (an absurdity, you will notice, though an absurdity with a surplus of sense), passing itself across the stage of the delusional, briefly, wing to wing, only to spontaneously discover the question of a locus. Was the question already there waiting to be asked? Waiting wouldn't have been enough to make it a question. More to the point, we can't rule out the possibility that the mime will one day be able to spontaneously answer the question he discovered in his own voice. Nothing will have happened spontaneously in representation that wouldn't have been an absurdity had representation been spontaneity–but that doesn't preclude our finding any sense in the equation, naturally.

Labels: inner speech, Levinas, methexis, personhood, spontaneity, temporality

posted by Fido the Yak at 3:39 PM. 0 comments

Virginia Woolf wrote, "In books as in people, graces and charms are delightful for the moment but become insipid unless they are felt to be part of some general energy or quality of character." Should we be led to imagine that some general energy of corroborees (or quieter colloquies) doesn't endure? Surely on the one hand we're free to take Woolf's point and still attend to qualities of characters, to an emergent sense of a juxtaposition, temporal conjunction or an interpersonal exchange. On the other hand, there is a risk of becoming distracted. We have so few opportunities in life to really get to know another person.

Labels: blogging, Browne, personhood, reading, Woolf

posted by Fido the Yak at 7:20 AM. 2 comments

Elias Canetti says:

Most important of all is talking to unknown people. But it has to be done in such a way that they do the talking, and the only thing one does oneself is to get them to talk. When that is no longer possible for a man, then death has begun.

(The Human Province, p.243, in The Other Side of Language, p. 122)

I wonder if Canetti actually wrote "human being" (Mensch) instead of "man." Corradi Fiumara reads this passage and says that, conversely, "until we become capable of getting something unknown to talk to us we have not yet begun to live and interact" (ibidem). I recall that she also says there is "a whole world yet to be discovered, not of unsolved issues, but of relationships amongs things we know, of ways in which they might fit together" (p. 17). I'd like to see if these two statements can be reconciled, but I will focus on the person, and specifically, the unknown person.

Strictly speaking I doubt whether any person, over the course of a lifetime, can remain completely unknown. What we find in the unknown person is our own ignorance. On the other hand no person is completely known, at least not by us.

How should we behave towards a person who would rather remain incognito, a person who would rather not talk to us? Is disconnection also a connection we can discover? Is it important to attend to expressions of disconnection?

An obvious connection exists between disconnection and death. The connection between disconnection and life may be less obvious. There is also a relationship between forgetting and death. Remembering the forgotten person connects us to life, our own life which we find to be a coexistence. The dream of an absolute coexistence, however, may also be forgetful. The unknown person's freedom to disconnect reminds us, if we are prepared to listen, of our own freedom. Do we want to be able to speak of a freedom to be forgotten?

Freedom cannot be presented as the autonomy of a subjectivity in charge of itself and of its decisions, evolving freely and in perfect independence from every obstacle. What would such an independence mean, if not the impossibility in principle of entering into the slightest relation–and therefore of exercising the slightest freedom? The linking or interlacing of relations doubteless does not precede freedom, but is contemporaneous and coextensive with it, in the same way that being-in-common is contemporaneous with singular existence and coextensive with its own spatiality. The singular being is in relation, or according to relation, to the same extent that its singularity can consist (and in a sense always consists) in exempting itself or in cutting itself off from every relation. Singularity consists in the "just once, this time" [une seule fois, celle-ci], whose mere enunciation–similar to the infant's cry at birth, and it is necessarily each time a question of birth–establishes a relation at the same time that it infinitely hollows out the time and space that are supposed to be "common" around the point of enunciation. At this point, it is each time freedom that is singularly born. (And it is birth that frees.)

(The Experience of Freedom, p. 66, Nancy's emphases)

I feel many people, many intellects, deserve to be better known. More widely known, but also better known. I'm sure the latter is a common sentiment among those who blog about intellectuals. I might say better not forgotten. Gemma Corradi Fiumara is a case in point, and I intend to blog about her more recent books as time permits. Do we better know an intellect by seeing her relation to other intellects, or can that also be a form of forgetting? Getting to know somebody may be a process that involves relating to others and also maintaining distances. If we restrict relating one intellect to another to a function of an introductory phase of getting to know an intellect, are we then left with the proposition that the perfect or mature knowledge of an intellect is distant? More healthy, I think, would be to see discoveries of relations as recurring moments (or "each times") of a long process of getting to know somebody. (Nancy would place continuity under suspicion, I would interrogate discontinuity further.)

Does remembering cover all the bases here, or is there an opening for the new? Do we ever need to be reminded that people are new to us?

Labels: Canetti, Corradi Fiumara, intellectuals, Nancy, personhood, relations, singularity

posted by Fido the Yak at 8:06 AM. 0 comments

What would it mean today to view the world according to a concretely personal conception? Jan Patočka introduces us to this problem beginning with the pre-Socratic discovery of the world, which is coextensive with the discovery of mathematics (An Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology, trans. Erazim Kohák, Open Court, 1996). In particular, this is the discovery of the whole of the world, the cosmos, complete with the abyss of nothingness that surrounds it. "As with mathematical entities, there is here something independent of the given, something which its objectification presupposes and which for that very reason is not accepted, strictly speaking, but rather something accessible to us not from external givenness but from internal freedom" (p. 6). Patočka, though, sees a limit in the Greek understanding:

Precisely this objectively oriented practice, in this understanding of humanity in terms of a completed organism of things in the cosmos, reveals the limits of the Greek understanding of being, of the world, and of humans–of oneself and of the other. To the Greek mind the discovery of the whole did not mean at the same time a discovery of human being with each other in its fullness, in its originality. Humans, to be sure, were discovered originally in terms of their relation to the kosmos–as worldly being–though not together with the originality of their relation to others which can be realized only in a turn no less profound that the turn from individual things to their global coherence.

(p. 11)

The next stage in thinking the world that Patočka consideres is the (more or less) Cartesian discovery of the abstractly personal conception of the world.

The abstract person and its relation to the world are will and domination. This will shatters the ancient kosmos and all its legacy, things no longer constitute an organic whole. The world is no longer an equal participant in a shared drama, rather, we are free with respect to it, it does not represent a fundamental limit for us but rather is for us a stage, a reservoir of raw materials, the basis for action in which it ultimately figures as a mere subordinate component. Because we, too, are objects in the world, we deal with humans similarly, generating not only a technology of things but in conjunction with it a technology of the organization of human resources. The abstractly personal relation to the world is thus a technology which becomes its own purpose. In a basic contradiction in the being of humans: to be the world-constituting being and at the same time a thing in the world–this abstractly personal relation leads to an actual subjugation of humans by the aspect of will and domination as such.

(p. 13)

He passes on to Kant and the thinkers that followed.

Subsequent thinkers posed the question of the world in a new way: as a matter of a revitalization of withered human relations, restoring them to an inward from in which the other, without ceasing to be other, loses its strangeness and externality and becomes no less an internal content of our lives than we of its. That gave rise to the problem of a concretely personal conception of the world which transcends the abstractly personal conception as no more than its starting point and as the ground that makes it possible, though it finds the overall meaning, otherwise absent from it, only in a community of mutual respect and mutually interchanging individualites.

The concretely personal conception hopes to attain this global construction of the meaning of the world and of being by unfolding a new logic, capable not only of construing the relation of the subject to nature but also a system of spiritual relations in a historical evolution. It will succeed where ancient metaphysics was shipwrecked: it will be a logic of action and movement, not merely a logic of changeless structure, of transtemporality. It will, however, be at the same time a logic of the whole, an exhaustive logic, the logic of the final uncovering, obscured by nothing.

(pp. 14-15)

Patočka quickly moves from Hegel to Husserlian phenomenology.

Face to face with this focus on contemporary discussion, methodologically continuous with empiricism and its reflective method, another conception of the question that led to the rise of Greek philosophy is emerging, of the question for the drama of the world, for being which bestows meaning on all that is and sets each particular a priori into a meaningful framework. It is a conception which also sees the meaning of philosophy in setting humans free for a prevenient continuity of the world and of being, but so analyzes the continuity that as a consequence of these analyses we might doubt whether that continuity can itself ever be surveyed as a whole, mastered, and exhausted.

(p. 15)

I'm stricken by Patočka's optimism. In Body, Community, Language, World we caught a glimpse of how Patočka would extend phenomenology beyond his roots in Husserl and Heidegger. In Introduction he is closer to his phenomenological roots, but in several chapters he will develop his own thinking on such problems as the body and temporality. I'm interested in how he sees the personal, a dominant theme of Body, as a project carried on by phenomenology. I like the idea of the personal being caught up in the drama of the world, and I am stricken by Patočka's grasp of threads in the history of philosophy, such as the drama of the world. Someday I hope to read his Heretical Essays in the History of Philosophy (my order for that book was finally cancelled after many months of waiting).

Labels: Patočka, personhood, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:42 AM. 0 comments

I was flipping through Eugen Fink's Existenz und Coexistenz when the following sentence sprung out at me: "The human being exists as a relation" (Der Mensch existiert als ein Verhältnis). I'd like to play with that as an ontological proposistion, but I'll make some modifications so as to end up with this sentence: The human being by nature is a person who relates.

The first problem I see that I should want to guard against is a substantialist reading of the human being or person. This is not in the letter or spirit of what Fink is talking about, and it's not an interpretation I should want to slip into or allow to be nurtured as a subtext to my own sometimes fuzzy thinking about the matter. I used the phrase "by nature" as a nod to Aristotle, but my understanding of nature is rather existential, and I certainly don't mean to import Aristotlean metaphysics wholesale. However, I do mean to personalize the problem, to embody it in a person, a who, a who who acts in this characteristic way of relating, always as a person. So I definitely do not mean that the human being is by nature a being that relates or even a person that relates. The human being is always a person, a who.

The personal relation implies a plurality. There is always the person who does this or that, and there is at least one other person who is addressed by the very fact of personhood. Speaking in the third person can we imagine a kind of other that is not another person, and we can imagine another kind of action, but the essential addressivity of being a person cannot be wiped away. The addressivity of being a person is not merely a matter of a reciprocity of viewpoints implied by speaking. It is a vital aspect of our whoness, of how we naturally relate to the world.

Is there an intentional structure to human relating? Must we always relate to something? I don't know. In personal addressivity we are always already relating to other persons, but it is not clear to me, dear reader, whether such persons may not be allowed to remain vague and undifferentiated. Evidently we can relate to the possibility of another person as if it were actual. I won't dare to call this possibility Other. It could after all be me.

Labels: Fink, humanity, ontology, personhood, relationality

posted by Fido the Yak at 6:29 PM. 0 comments

Jan Patočka writes: "A biological organism becomes a real person in the moment when I can do something on my own (i.e. move)."¹ In this passage Patočka has moved from Descartes discovery of personhood² to Maine de Biran's philosophy of effort, which provides the germ of Patočka's own unique contribution to the phenomenology of the body. Do you balk at equating personhood with motility? I do. Ask yourself, are spirochetes persons? In what sense are they or are they not persons? Because there is some sense to Patočka's argument here. Whatever else it is, being a person is a matter of having an orientation, of being embodied, necessarily. Patočka concludes this lecture by looking at how the body is thematicized:

Our body is a moment of a situation in which we are; it is not a thing. Just as a situation is a moment in a sequence of events with a definite structure and field of action, so our body is always a moment in an impersonal situation. Because our body is a situational concept, it has aslo the traits of human situation as such, that is, we cannot speak of it without noting that it places us in a certain reality, which is already present while at the same time lifting us out of it, in a way distancing us from it. Maine de Biran's hyperorganic power actually means that in a certain sense we are entirely body, no more, but in a certain sense also that we elude facticity.³

Here's a game. I can imagine playing a scale on the saxophone, a blues scale in G on an E^b sax. (The same exercise can be performed with a typewriter, basketball, chef's knife, whatever.) It takes some effort. It takes effort to suppress the urge to actually move my fingers. I can become conscious of making the effort to limit the exercise to a mental rehearsal of playing a scale. I can throw in hearing the tones, or breathing exercises. Is this effort the same quality of effort that is required to actually play a scale? I don't believe so.

All animals that play exhibit a quality of acting that goes beyond motility. They can act as if. The field of human interactions has yet another dimension, because only humans have material culture. (I am not ready to concede that Chimps have anything like a genuine material culture, though the evidence for it would be worth considering some time.) For the human being, personhood is largely a function of one's toys. If I know what kind of toys you have, I already know a lot about what kind of person you are.

Labels: body, life, Maine de Biran, Patočka, personhood, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 1:29 PM. 2 comments