Temporality is the name of that which holds the movement of life together, while simultaneously making of life a series of moments, of flowing presents and past retentions. The movement of temporality takes on central importance in the Phenomenology of Perception because it is our movement as existing subjects, condemned to meaning, or as it were, condemned to unfold temporally. In apprehension, what is apprehended is only apprehended in retrospection as part of the temporal flux, and that this reflection itself is in turn part of the flux. Time is a self-relation wherein the self seems to be reduced to a moment of non-being, or absence, taking place in relative fields of presence. We are, as it were, the absence, the kernel of non-being, which relates the passive and active poles, the space from which comes the upsurge of time. We live, as it were, in the midst of a temporal field, in a world, we do not constitute but take up and reckon with it in order to express, say, and act. We can’t not unfold in this manner, as our being is not simply a transparent given, but rather a temporal unfolding in a temporal field. Neither is time simply an eternal something which is complete alongside our being. Beneath the temporality of our acts, expressions, gestures, lies an intentionality which pushes them all along, an operant intentionality which comes before all of them and which they cannot do without. There is a time that we are existingly as living, or unfolding in the world, and there is a temporality, which serves as the background, from which our existence derives its significance. In the present, the living present, we have the moment wherein our being and our consciousness of being intersect and overlap in a spontaneous acquisition, which upon reflection, is appropriated in a historical field which I carry along as so many retentions of past acquisitions. Once acquired these acquisitions become part of the retentions which I protend into the horizon of the future; even further, they become part of the spontaneous self which apprehends in the moment of the living present. Time is the subject, the relation, the dialectic between being and having, the acquired and the possible.
It is perhaps here in the temporality chapter that the true significance of the Phenomenology of Perception is brought to the foreground. We live in fields of fields, of which temporality is simply the most basic, or perhaps the most originary. We historically have had the tendency to privilege the activities of thetic intentionality and disregard the level of ‘mere’ existence which lives beneath it. This example, of what Merleau-Ponty would call “high altitude” thinking, is precisely that which Merleau-Ponty is aiming at when he points at the pre-objective present which is the basis upon which thetic intentionality can function at all. It is therefore the case that this “high altitude” thinking seems to undermine its own claims to objective validity, when it fails to notice that it is erected upon a “pyramid of time” sexual energies, mistaken utterances and even possibly erroneous conclusions. In short, we reckon with all that is given explicitly and that which is not explicit, that which is simply operant in every effort to express, act, or engage with others and the world we share. What we project, in the first place, is the same thing we encounter again and again in every reflection, in every attempt to step back from the flux and arrest its flow if even for a moment, and that is a world which comes before me and yet which I effect with my own movement and the movements of others. The world is always given in advance as part of my unfolding which is the movement of time.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Merleau-Ponty- "The Phenomenology of Perception" III
The chapter on the “Body in its Sexual Being” must be understood as an elaboration of the notion of “motor power,” or “motor intentionality,” outlined in the chapter on “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility.” That is to say, that if we took Merleau-Ponty seriously when he claimed that all motor action, or movement, has a background, or rather that the background is immanent within the movement itself, then it follows that in his treatment of sexuality he is making this background explicit. In other words the background exists as a field of significance, and rather than being some kind of representational projection, it would be a kind immanent intentionality operating in simultaneity with the body’s motility. The point Merleau-Ponty is attempting to make is that we do not simply encounter a world, as it were from some neutral perspective, but rather we are always already an opening onto the world from somewhere. When Merleau-Ponty says that there must be an ‘Eros’ or a ‘Libido’ which “breathes life” into bodily existence he is gesturing towards the inescapable fact that sexuality, or sexual life, is an ‘original intentionality.’ If we attend to the sexual field that is deployed in perceptual experience it becomes relevant to say that in desire, that is in a desirous moment of silence, we come to appropriate the world, and entities encountered therein, erotically. It seems to be the case, even further, that by engaging with the experience in this way, that is by naming the experience erotic, we have already taken leave of the experience and entered the realm of the objective where this field of experience seems unproblematic, or determinate. How can we speak of this realm of experience without distorting it, without abstracting from what it gives us? The body is simultaneously my ability to take up the sexual experience, as it is given in its ambiguity, and also my ability to step back from it and abstract, or speak of it making it manifest in the order of determinate things. It seems to be the case, therefore, that there is a sexual field deployed indeterminately, upon which, the objective, or determinate order is established. The only way to take up this pre-objective attitude, this ambiguous texture of experience, is to live it. The body is the site of the interweaving between existence and sexuality such that their limits overlap and intersect. We are, as it were, at the site of undecidability, that is, we have emerged at the place where it no longer makes sense to attempt to distinguish between the phenomenal, nor the sexual field, they are ambiguously co-present.
If metaphysics is“–the coming to light of something beyond nature–” then sexuality would have metaphysical significance. The body as it opens upon others is fundamentally sexual, that is it uncovers the world in the ambiguity of a sexual field. Desire, love, modesty and shame articulate a metaphysics of the world as it is uncovered in embodiment. We cannot isolate the sexual kernel from the general unfolding of experience it is part of the texture, the fabric, or the style of existence. In transcending ourselves when encountering the other in a movement of existence we come across the other as desirable, repulsive, as stimulating perhaps even in ways beyond our capacity to name The point is that these ways are simply operant in our perception such that it seems to be true to say that in order to adopt the rationalist, or idealist perspective we must completely forget the fact of our existing and ignore the metaphysics of the everyday layer of experience. The indeterminacy of existence is not some accident, or mistake in perception, it is the metaphysics of perception itself.
If metaphysics is“–the coming to light of something beyond nature–” then sexuality would have metaphysical significance. The body as it opens upon others is fundamentally sexual, that is it uncovers the world in the ambiguity of a sexual field. Desire, love, modesty and shame articulate a metaphysics of the world as it is uncovered in embodiment. We cannot isolate the sexual kernel from the general unfolding of experience it is part of the texture, the fabric, or the style of existence. In transcending ourselves when encountering the other in a movement of existence we come across the other as desirable, repulsive, as stimulating perhaps even in ways beyond our capacity to name The point is that these ways are simply operant in our perception such that it seems to be true to say that in order to adopt the rationalist, or idealist perspective we must completely forget the fact of our existing and ignore the metaphysics of the everyday layer of experience. The indeterminacy of existence is not some accident, or mistake in perception, it is the metaphysics of perception itself.
Merleau-Ponty- "The Phenomenology of Perception" II
The body is an intentional structure in that it is always already an engaged perspective. There is no view from nowhere, which we might have access to, or invoke, such that the world and all the phenomena therein might be accounted for as third person processes, objectively and for all-time. For Merleau-Ponty, the body guarantees our involvement in the ‘here’ and ‘now,’ even though it might be difficult to say just what is meant by this ‘here’ and this ‘now.’ It seems important to say, however, that we already encounter them in some way before we come to see them as questionable. It is our being-in-the-world that allows us to engage with a ‘here’ and ‘now’ without having to ask what they are, without having to provide ourselves with an account of their constitution, they are, as it were, taken pre-reflectively. To say that “the body is the vehicle of being in the world” is to point to the body as the location of this pre-reflective engagement with the world. The body is, therefore, both that which we are, as perceiving subjects, and the view or perspective from which we see the world. Merleau-Ponty’s primary criticism of the physiological and psychological accounts of embodiment is that they come on the scene too late and have already missed that which has been given in the movement of being-in-the-world. The pathological phenomena of phantom limb and anosognosia reveal the primacy of being-in-the-world in the act of perception and the body as the seat of perception.
Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phenomena of the phantom limb and anosognosia emerges from his dialectical engagement with the physiological and psychological accounts of the same phenomena. His account of being-in-the-world, as a pre-objective view of the world and phenomena therein, is a mediation between the failures of the physiological and psychological accounts. By placing being-in-the-world firmly in the unified structure of the body, the body becomes the invisible center of perception. In this sense, the availability of the body’s capacities would be that which is most often taken for granted in our everyday way of being-in-the-world. The body is, therefore, the product of biological and cultural inheritance. Furthermore, each particular moment brings with it the entirety of my past and the past of the species. The body is, therefore, both a personal and practical field and the anonymous field of a body in general. Explained through being-in-the-world, the phenomenon of phantom limb appears as the pathological adherence to a world wherein the absent limb would still be available and afford itself to our intentions. Similarly, in the case of anosognosia, the subject is pre-refectively aware of a deficiency on the level of his being-in-the-world, but simply refuses to reflect upon it in order not to feel the absence. Merleau-Ponty’s account upsets the traditional account, which suffers from the prejudice of presence, by returning to the layer of lived experience, which encounters the body as an “I can”.
Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phenomena of the phantom limb and anosognosia emerges from his dialectical engagement with the physiological and psychological accounts of the same phenomena. His account of being-in-the-world, as a pre-objective view of the world and phenomena therein, is a mediation between the failures of the physiological and psychological accounts. By placing being-in-the-world firmly in the unified structure of the body, the body becomes the invisible center of perception. In this sense, the availability of the body’s capacities would be that which is most often taken for granted in our everyday way of being-in-the-world. The body is, therefore, the product of biological and cultural inheritance. Furthermore, each particular moment brings with it the entirety of my past and the past of the species. The body is, therefore, both a personal and practical field and the anonymous field of a body in general. Explained through being-in-the-world, the phenomenon of phantom limb appears as the pathological adherence to a world wherein the absent limb would still be available and afford itself to our intentions. Similarly, in the case of anosognosia, the subject is pre-refectively aware of a deficiency on the level of his being-in-the-world, but simply refuses to reflect upon it in order not to feel the absence. Merleau-Ponty’s account upsets the traditional account, which suffers from the prejudice of presence, by returning to the layer of lived experience, which encounters the body as an “I can”.
Merleau-Ponty- "The Phenomenology of Perception" I
The movement of the first time, the establishment of a new a priori, a sense-organ. The movement, which allows me to go further, to reorganize the background from whence this perception emerged as intelligible, as something to be understood. Paramount to the account Merleau-Ponty gives us, is that Perception is an originating realm and that the body is that strange unity which is both ‘intentional’ (toward things), and ‘sense-giving’ (constitutive of those things). The body is the site between the movement of active constitution and passive appropriation. This movement is our movement, the ‘founding relation’ whereby we come to have recourse to something like the sedimentation of an a priori. What comes to light in the movement of the “first perception,” in the truth of the first time? Furthermore, how does this experience fit into his criticism of the intellectualist and empiricist accounts?
In the first place, we would come across colours upon a different sort of background, a background which is the projection of a sedimented history, something like the history of our experiences to date. While colours would not yet form any part of our perceptual experience, in the truth of the first time, we would gain access to them as a kind of indeterminate experience. Faced with the ambiguity of the indeterminate experience we would take it up into ourselves, in a movement of appropriation, such that the background, or the history of our experience to date will be altered in the wake of this novel experience. In this movement, the movement between the passive encounter with the first appearance of colour, and its appropriation into the now altered structure of consciousness, we render the indeterminate content of experience determinate. The structure of consciousness has been altered in the wake of this movement, in view of its capacity to understand, or reactivate the truth of the first colour experience. This experience opens up a new dimension of possible experience; it is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty invokes the notion of horizons and the possibility of extending or broadening their scope. It is the case, therefore, that every subsequent encounter with colour will be founded upon the truth of the first time. The establishment of a necessary structure, an a priori, in turn assures that the truth of the first time remains present every time. This is not to say that this structure is static, or does not undergo alterations and refinements of its own, but rather that each subsequent colour experience is already understood in terms of the a priori sedimented in the appropriation of the inaugurating experience.
This account is essential to the sustained critique of the intellectualist and empiricist traditions, in that it provides and account of learning which is suspiciously absent in either account. Merleau-Ponty provides an account about how it is that we come to understand the world in terms of the experiences we have therein. We do not perceive things in the world as a kind of ‘tabula rasa,’ but rather as already part of a tradition, which interprets. It is therefore the case that even in our founding movements, in the truths of the inaugural perceptions they are already part of a framework, or background of previously interpreted phenomena. For Merleau-Ponty, among the primary task seems to be an attempt to get behind, or perhaps underneath these inaugural experiences in order to make manifest the layers of a priori sedimentation that contribute to the interpretation of indeterminate phenomena in certain determinate ways.
In the first place, we would come across colours upon a different sort of background, a background which is the projection of a sedimented history, something like the history of our experiences to date. While colours would not yet form any part of our perceptual experience, in the truth of the first time, we would gain access to them as a kind of indeterminate experience. Faced with the ambiguity of the indeterminate experience we would take it up into ourselves, in a movement of appropriation, such that the background, or the history of our experience to date will be altered in the wake of this novel experience. In this movement, the movement between the passive encounter with the first appearance of colour, and its appropriation into the now altered structure of consciousness, we render the indeterminate content of experience determinate. The structure of consciousness has been altered in the wake of this movement, in view of its capacity to understand, or reactivate the truth of the first colour experience. This experience opens up a new dimension of possible experience; it is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty invokes the notion of horizons and the possibility of extending or broadening their scope. It is the case, therefore, that every subsequent encounter with colour will be founded upon the truth of the first time. The establishment of a necessary structure, an a priori, in turn assures that the truth of the first time remains present every time. This is not to say that this structure is static, or does not undergo alterations and refinements of its own, but rather that each subsequent colour experience is already understood in terms of the a priori sedimented in the appropriation of the inaugurating experience.
This account is essential to the sustained critique of the intellectualist and empiricist traditions, in that it provides and account of learning which is suspiciously absent in either account. Merleau-Ponty provides an account about how it is that we come to understand the world in terms of the experiences we have therein. We do not perceive things in the world as a kind of ‘tabula rasa,’ but rather as already part of a tradition, which interprets. It is therefore the case that even in our founding movements, in the truths of the inaugural perceptions they are already part of a framework, or background of previously interpreted phenomena. For Merleau-Ponty, among the primary task seems to be an attempt to get behind, or perhaps underneath these inaugural experiences in order to make manifest the layers of a priori sedimentation that contribute to the interpretation of indeterminate phenomena in certain determinate ways.
Heidegger- "Being and Time" VI
Heidegger’s temporal interpretation of understanding is part of his attempt to make manifest the temporal constitution of the structure of care. The understanding is an existentiale part of the structure of care. As such, if we are to determine the temporal constitution of care, the existentiale structures, which together constitute care as a unified phenomenon, must themselves be capable of unfolding within the same temporality as care itself. The understanding, treated in this manner, can be treated ontologically as something in flow, in the process of unfolding, a structure whose completion is “not-yet.” Taken as an object in a cognitivist account, the understanding is already determinate, in other words, no longer in flux. In the cognitivist account of the understanding, it is as a completed structure, having already accomplished itself as content in the movement of understanding. As understood by the cognitivist, there is no way to maintain the understanding as a possibility; as such the understanding is always already inauthentic in the Heideggerian sense. The temporal interpretation of understanding is significant in that it is possible to view the understanding as a pre-cognitive structure which is livingly enacted in the world always already involved in the interpretive temporal unfolding of a horizon.
The temporal horizon, in the account of the understanding is taken ecstatically in the sense that it is taken as primarily composed of a past present and a future. The understanding is for the most part a futural structure in that it is always already engaged in projecting its possibilities into the future. It is always ahead of itself in its projections. In “anticipation” the understanding is authentically projecting its possibilities as possibilities. Inauthentically, the understanding simply “awaits” the realization of itself in possibilities, which have been given to it in advance. The present, taken in resoluteness, is authentic in that it remains resolute in the face of the unrealized projections, or possibilities of the understanding. The present, taken inauthentically, makes present the ‘now’ as something present at hand. The past taken resolutely remains possible as a repetition, as something, which remains a possible projection into the future. Inauthentically, the past is forgotten and is closed, or settled the way things are settled in everydayness. In each case we have an understanding, which can close, or allow itself to be determined by the inauthenticity of the given ways of being. Or, it can maintain itself as an authentic possibility of itself in the sense that it can remain open to the projection of its own possibilities.
The understanding, as understood from the horizon of temporality, gives the understanding to itself as something to be understood. In other words as the understanding projects itself into the future and, in turn, faces itself as that towards which it is on the way. The understanding therefore encounters itself temporally as something to be understood.
The temporal horizon, in the account of the understanding is taken ecstatically in the sense that it is taken as primarily composed of a past present and a future. The understanding is for the most part a futural structure in that it is always already engaged in projecting its possibilities into the future. It is always ahead of itself in its projections. In “anticipation” the understanding is authentically projecting its possibilities as possibilities. Inauthentically, the understanding simply “awaits” the realization of itself in possibilities, which have been given to it in advance. The present, taken in resoluteness, is authentic in that it remains resolute in the face of the unrealized projections, or possibilities of the understanding. The present, taken inauthentically, makes present the ‘now’ as something present at hand. The past taken resolutely remains possible as a repetition, as something, which remains a possible projection into the future. Inauthentically, the past is forgotten and is closed, or settled the way things are settled in everydayness. In each case we have an understanding, which can close, or allow itself to be determined by the inauthenticity of the given ways of being. Or, it can maintain itself as an authentic possibility of itself in the sense that it can remain open to the projection of its own possibilities.
The understanding, as understood from the horizon of temporality, gives the understanding to itself as something to be understood. In other words as the understanding projects itself into the future and, in turn, faces itself as that towards which it is on the way. The understanding therefore encounters itself temporally as something to be understood.
Heidegger- "Being and Time" V
“anticipatory resoluteness” we are presented with a structure, which is simultaneously active and passive. That is to say we are forced to reckon with a structure, which is an actively engaged passivity. In order to expand upon what this active passivity might entail, that is in order to engage with ‘how’ it operates, we must first turn to the ‘what’ of “anticipatory resoluteness.” In anticipation, Dasein anticipates the arrival of the ‘not-yet,’ which is at once a coming to-be, that is a possibility of Dasein, and an already having been authentically. If, as we have seen, Dasein is already its ‘not-yet,’ how does Dasein encounter the ‘not’ of the ‘not-yet,’ how does it encounter the non-relational aspect of its possibility? The call of conscience is Dasein’s call to itself. In other words care, as the structure of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, calls forth Dasein to own up, or become responsible for the ownmost possibility of its being. Being-guilty, is the phenomenon of being-responsible for the ‘not-yet’ the nothing, which makes possible our Being-in-the-world and only manifest in the light of Dasein as a whole. In our everyday way of Being this phenomenon gets passed over or stays hidden, concealed, in our dealings with ourselves, others, and the world, in the inauthentic mode of das man. The call of conscience brings the phenomenon of Being-guilty out of concealment such that we might actively take it up as an authentic possibility. If we are attentive to its movement we are able to treat this structure in a manner similar to the structure of Being-towards-death; that is, as an opening towards the possibility of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole of Dasein. In attending to the call, that is in understanding the call, Dasein finds itself there, wanting to have a conscience, such that the Self is called forth in its Being-Guilty. This phenomenon, once again, similar to Heidegger’s account of Being-toward-death, authentically, appears as anxiety in the face of the ‘not-yet.’
Resoluteness is precisely the projection of Dasein’s Self–not the they-self of das man–towards its Being-guilty as resolved even in the face of anxiety. Anxiety, which once again appears in the face of the ‘not-yet’ as the possibility of impossibility of Dasein. As such it makes sense when Heidegger states that “Only when it ‘qualifies’ itself as Being-towards-death does resoluteness understand the ‘can’ of its potentiality-for-Being guilty” (BT- 306). In other words it is only in resoluteness, which is a way of actively or resolvedly letting oneself be, can death be taken up as a possibility. In order for this active passivity to be lived we must turn to the structure of anticipation that is seemingly already implied in resoluteness itself. It is only in Being-towards-the-end, that is Being-towards-death, as a kind of running ahead to the totality, that resoluteness can manifest the authentic potentiality of its Being in the structure of Being-towards-death as anticipation. It is therefore the case that only in anticipation can Dasein’s Being-guilty be taken as an opening as the structure of the ‘not-yet.’ It is only through “anticipatory resoluteness” that Dasein can disclose itself and the world authentically in terms of its potentiality-for-Being-a-whole. In each case anticipation at once encounters the non-relational, the possibility of impossibility, as a possibility. Anticipation discloses the possibility of Dasein’s primordial Being-towards-death as possible. “As Being-towards-the-end which understands–that is to say, as anticipation of death–resoluteness becomes authentically what it can be” (BT-305). To adopt this actively passive stance we would continuously take possession of ourselves as a whole. A whole in-terms-of-which and for-the-sake-of-which are.
Resoluteness is precisely the projection of Dasein’s Self–not the they-self of das man–towards its Being-guilty as resolved even in the face of anxiety. Anxiety, which once again appears in the face of the ‘not-yet’ as the possibility of impossibility of Dasein. As such it makes sense when Heidegger states that “Only when it ‘qualifies’ itself as Being-towards-death does resoluteness understand the ‘can’ of its potentiality-for-Being guilty” (BT- 306). In other words it is only in resoluteness, which is a way of actively or resolvedly letting oneself be, can death be taken up as a possibility. In order for this active passivity to be lived we must turn to the structure of anticipation that is seemingly already implied in resoluteness itself. It is only in Being-towards-the-end, that is Being-towards-death, as a kind of running ahead to the totality, that resoluteness can manifest the authentic potentiality of its Being in the structure of Being-towards-death as anticipation. It is therefore the case that only in anticipation can Dasein’s Being-guilty be taken as an opening as the structure of the ‘not-yet.’ It is only through “anticipatory resoluteness” that Dasein can disclose itself and the world authentically in terms of its potentiality-for-Being-a-whole. In each case anticipation at once encounters the non-relational, the possibility of impossibility, as a possibility. Anticipation discloses the possibility of Dasein’s primordial Being-towards-death as possible. “As Being-towards-the-end which understands–that is to say, as anticipation of death–resoluteness becomes authentically what it can be” (BT-305). To adopt this actively passive stance we would continuously take possession of ourselves as a whole. A whole in-terms-of-which and for-the-sake-of-which are.
Heidegger- "Being and Time" IV
We are, as it were, presented with an absolute opening. We act into this opening, attempting to close it off with our actions, our words, and our projects. We act as if it were possible to name the opening, as if we could finally say what it is, and that it is this way or that. But we are constantly thrust back; the opening remains open so that we may go further and, were the opening to close, our possibilities would close with it. The structure that Heidegger elucidates is the paradoxical structure of Dasein, such that when Heidegger states enigmatically, “Dasein is already its “not-yet””, (BT 245) he already has the totalized structure in view; the finitude of Dasein which possesses within itself a kernel of the infinite. What is this “not-yet”? Does it not mark the impossibility of a closed structure? Is it an “end,” which is at the same time an opening, allowing us to go further? To say that Dasein is already its “not-yet” is simply to point to the fact that Dasein is already ahead of itself in being towards its possibilities. Dasein always has the possibility of going beyond, of going further. In the “not-yet”, we are presented with a kernel of the future, that which evades interpretation, that which allows us to continue onward. The Being of Dasein is a Being-towards the future, towards the radical opening, which is at the same time the “end” toward which Dasein exists. The “not-yet,” always remains outstanding, always evades Dasein’s attempt to settle the matter or provide it with a definitive interpretation. Dasein is its to-be as a projection of its possibilities into the world, towards that which it is “not-yet.” Dasein is already this “not-yet” insofar as it is already its possibility. If we turn specifically to the notions of “totality,” “end” and “death,” we are in each case faced with a structure similar to that of the “not-yet.” We are not, as it were, presented with events, it is not literally the event of death, which Heidegger is invoking, nor is it “demise” in the Heideggerian sense, and neither is the ‘end’ a kind of finality or last moment. In each case what is important is what Heidegger calls the Being-towards, which is the way of the Being of Dasein.
If we are attentive to the movement Heidegger outlines, we can see that the whole is presupposed and that the structure is never closed until we ourselves are at-an-end, until the event of our “demise.” It is therefore the case that death reveals that by living towards the “not-yet” we are, as it were, living towards the infinite opening in the structure of Being. Death reveals this possibility by making manifest the “possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (BT 251). In other words Dasein is presented with the possibility of its own impossibility. Death forces Dasein to reckon with its own finitude – a finitude from which it cannot escape. It is the case however, that this reckoning goes further, in the sense that Dasein is forced to face its “ownmost” possibility, that towards-which it has no capacity to relate; it is precisely the inability to relate. Even further as possibility, this kind of reckoning reveals to Dasein the impossibility of its going beyond even though it can envisage a beyond all the same. Dasein is thrown towards a possibility to which it cannot relate and cannot overcome; it is thrust upon the end of itself. Dasein is always already its end when it reckons in this way, in that it always completes itself in the movement of reckoning. However, until it’s demise, it continuously finds itself disposed, able to go further to beyond itself. This way of Being-towards-death makes manifest the possibility of Dasein’s Being-futural as a kind of temporal unfolding in time.
If we are attentive to the movement Heidegger outlines, we can see that the whole is presupposed and that the structure is never closed until we ourselves are at-an-end, until the event of our “demise.” It is therefore the case that death reveals that by living towards the “not-yet” we are, as it were, living towards the infinite opening in the structure of Being. Death reveals this possibility by making manifest the “possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (BT 251). In other words Dasein is presented with the possibility of its own impossibility. Death forces Dasein to reckon with its own finitude – a finitude from which it cannot escape. It is the case however, that this reckoning goes further, in the sense that Dasein is forced to face its “ownmost” possibility, that towards-which it has no capacity to relate; it is precisely the inability to relate. Even further as possibility, this kind of reckoning reveals to Dasein the impossibility of its going beyond even though it can envisage a beyond all the same. Dasein is thrown towards a possibility to which it cannot relate and cannot overcome; it is thrust upon the end of itself. Dasein is always already its end when it reckons in this way, in that it always completes itself in the movement of reckoning. However, until it’s demise, it continuously finds itself disposed, able to go further to beyond itself. This way of Being-towards-death makes manifest the possibility of Dasein’s Being-futural as a kind of temporal unfolding in time.
Heidegger- "Being and Time" III
In order to attend to what Heidegger outlines in his discussion of interpretation, the ‘as’ structure, and meaning, we must first be able to attend to the structure of the understanding itself. What is required, therefore, is a certain kind of attention, a way of seeing, or an attentiveness to the understanding, such that it comes to light, or is made manifest, in terms of itself. Through this kind of attentiveness, we might be able to grasp the understanding, as it were, understandingly, in terms of the possibilities it projects. Attention, mindfulness, or a vision of this sort, cannot be a presuppositionless undertaking, but rather must base itself upon the very understanding it seeks to attend to. This movement, which we are now attuned to–this movement of becoming attentive, the cultivation of our interpretive powers–is precisely the move Heidegger would have us attend to. The understanding is essentially circular in that the fore-structures of the understanding are the ground from which the interpretation interprets. By becoming attentive, by recognizing the hermeneutic circle, we are able to cultivate the movement of interpretation such that the fore-structures of the understanding might unfold in light of a responsibility to the things themselves. The understanding is a projection of Dasein’s possibilities, or fore-structures, which it may, or may not, attend to in an interpretive way, that is to say, meaningfully. In other words the understanding is always already engaged meaningfully when it comes to interpret the fore-structures of the understanding. Through this circle, we are provided with the ontological structure of meaning.
If we attend carefully to the movement that Heidegger unfolds–and to the attention we are able to give to it–we see that through our attentiveness we do not add anything to the understanding that wasn’t already there in advance, rather we realize the understanding in terms of the possibilities it already has. We must keep in mind the structure of the ready-to-hand– encountered circumspectively in terms of the ‘in-order-to’ that it possesses in reference to a totality of equipment– with which the understanding is always already actively involved. The understanding engages with ready-to-hand entities in terms of the background, the totality of involvements, the world of significance, which is a shared one. The understanding occurs, as it were, pre-cognitively, as a kind of pre-thematic engagement with the shared world. The prefix ‘pre’, does not mean to suggest that this way of engaging with the world must necessarily be thematized, but rather, that it always possesses this as a possibility of itself. When Heidegger says that, “in interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself” (MR, 188) he is pointing to the movement whereby interpretation accomplishes the understanding as something. The ‘as’ structure of interpretation is such that it is already involved in the unfolding of Dasein in terms of a totality of involvements, and opens up the possibility of making explicit the meaning structures latent therein. If this world of significance is indeed a shared one, as Heidegger suggests it is, then how often are we given over to the interpretations of others? How often do we engage in the movement of interpretation and surrender ourselves to the ready-made interpretations? It is only through this movement of becoming attentive that we are able to engage with the strange movement of the hermeneutic circle.
If we attend carefully to the movement that Heidegger unfolds–and to the attention we are able to give to it–we see that through our attentiveness we do not add anything to the understanding that wasn’t already there in advance, rather we realize the understanding in terms of the possibilities it already has. We must keep in mind the structure of the ready-to-hand– encountered circumspectively in terms of the ‘in-order-to’ that it possesses in reference to a totality of equipment– with which the understanding is always already actively involved. The understanding engages with ready-to-hand entities in terms of the background, the totality of involvements, the world of significance, which is a shared one. The understanding occurs, as it were, pre-cognitively, as a kind of pre-thematic engagement with the shared world. The prefix ‘pre’, does not mean to suggest that this way of engaging with the world must necessarily be thematized, but rather, that it always possesses this as a possibility of itself. When Heidegger says that, “in interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself” (MR, 188) he is pointing to the movement whereby interpretation accomplishes the understanding as something. The ‘as’ structure of interpretation is such that it is already involved in the unfolding of Dasein in terms of a totality of involvements, and opens up the possibility of making explicit the meaning structures latent therein. If this world of significance is indeed a shared one, as Heidegger suggests it is, then how often are we given over to the interpretations of others? How often do we engage in the movement of interpretation and surrender ourselves to the ready-made interpretations? It is only through this movement of becoming attentive that we are able to engage with the strange movement of the hermeneutic circle.
Heidegger- "Being in Time" II
If we are attentive to Heidegger’s formulation, we are, as it were, presented with the gradual unfolding of an account or an Interpretation of the Being of Dasein. An account whose promise is not yet present, and whose unfolding is on its way towards the possibility of something like a fundamental ontology. The existential analytic has thus far uncovered the Being of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. Furthermore, this Being-in-the-world has thus far been encountered in terms of a “circumspective absorption in references and assignments constitutive for the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment.” In other words Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, as concern, takes place in an environment wherein Dasein finds itself always already located in a meaningful way. As such, Dasein’s way of Being is always already located in meaningful contexts within which it unfolds its possibilities. In this particular passage, Heidegger points toward a kind of intentionality far more basic than the intentionality previously articulated by the tradition. It is an intentionality that is, quite simply, operant in the sense that Dasein is always already meaningfully engaged with the world.
Circumspection, if we attend to Heidegger’s formulation, is a non-theoretical way of ‘seeing’ which discloses entities in the world in a certain way. In other words, when Dasein is at its best it engages or is involved in a context, or environment, which it already understands circumspectively. Even further, ready-to-hand entities are always encountered circumspectively in terms of their ‘in-order-to’ functions. Or, in other words, the ready-to-hand entities, which Heidegger calls ‘equipment,’ are always already rendered determinate in terms of their ‘references’ and ‘ assignments.’ These ‘references’ and ‘assignments’ are already determined in light of the totality of equipment, or the world wherein and within which they appear. As such the ready-to-hand, as opposed to the present-at-hand, is not a thing which we might examine in terms of its properties, nor something we might subject to some kind of theoretical account of its nature. Rather, it is something we would encounter in the flow of our unfolding, such that it would afford itself to something we are already engaged in. For example, we would not need to think of the hammer in order to nail two boards together, rather the hammer would simply offer itself, as if assigned to our intention, to hammer in a kind of effortless movement a seemingly thoughtless way of skillfully engaging with the world. Furthermore, hammers would make no sense circumspectively in a world without nails and boards and things that require hammering. As such hammers make no sense outside a context of reference to the equipmental totality.
Being-in-the-world, has thus far presented itself as a meaningful way of being situated. It is, as Heidegger articulates it, a way of coping with the world pre-reflexively in light of the activity we are already engaged in, namely the activity of Being-in-the-world. As such, we encounter equipment, which offers itself to our understanding gaze, in terms of the possibilities it affords and the totality of equipment from which it comes. Any attempt to speak, or say what it is we are doing, or any failure in the performance of the task will draw us out of the state wherein we find ourselves already meaningfully engaged and place us before present-at-hand items and contexts which we seem to no longer understand.
Circumspection, if we attend to Heidegger’s formulation, is a non-theoretical way of ‘seeing’ which discloses entities in the world in a certain way. In other words, when Dasein is at its best it engages or is involved in a context, or environment, which it already understands circumspectively. Even further, ready-to-hand entities are always encountered circumspectively in terms of their ‘in-order-to’ functions. Or, in other words, the ready-to-hand entities, which Heidegger calls ‘equipment,’ are always already rendered determinate in terms of their ‘references’ and ‘ assignments.’ These ‘references’ and ‘assignments’ are already determined in light of the totality of equipment, or the world wherein and within which they appear. As such the ready-to-hand, as opposed to the present-at-hand, is not a thing which we might examine in terms of its properties, nor something we might subject to some kind of theoretical account of its nature. Rather, it is something we would encounter in the flow of our unfolding, such that it would afford itself to something we are already engaged in. For example, we would not need to think of the hammer in order to nail two boards together, rather the hammer would simply offer itself, as if assigned to our intention, to hammer in a kind of effortless movement a seemingly thoughtless way of skillfully engaging with the world. Furthermore, hammers would make no sense circumspectively in a world without nails and boards and things that require hammering. As such hammers make no sense outside a context of reference to the equipmental totality.
Being-in-the-world, has thus far presented itself as a meaningful way of being situated. It is, as Heidegger articulates it, a way of coping with the world pre-reflexively in light of the activity we are already engaged in, namely the activity of Being-in-the-world. As such, we encounter equipment, which offers itself to our understanding gaze, in terms of the possibilities it affords and the totality of equipment from which it comes. Any attempt to speak, or say what it is we are doing, or any failure in the performance of the task will draw us out of the state wherein we find ourselves already meaningfully engaged and place us before present-at-hand items and contexts which we seem to no longer understand.
Heidegger- "Being and Time" I
Heidegger begins with the question “What is meant by “Being-in”?” Taking this question as his point of departure, Heidegger proceeds to demonstrate how this question has been answered incorrectly by the Cartesian tradition. In the first place, this way of proceeding intends to demonstrate that for the most part, Dasein’s Being-in has been taken ontically in the sense of being something merely present-at-hand alongside other present-at-hand entities in the world. As such, the Cartesian tradition has passed over a much more basic phenomenon of Being-in-the-world as an a priori state of the Being of Dasein. Due to the absence of the ontological question, Being-in has for the most part been taken to be “knowing the world” grounded in a subjectivity which encounters a world of objects. Heidegger treats Being-in equiprimordially, or in such a way that its essence may not be given in any single modality of its Being. Furthermore, because Dasein’s Being-in-the-World, a particular modality of Being-in, is for the most part presupposed ontically it is most often veiled ontologically or understood negatively in terms of entities which it itself is not. By proceeding, as it were, apophatically, Heidegger will attempt to uncover a positive characterization of Being-in-the-world, not as something present at hand but as state of Dasein’s Being.
If we take Being-in, as Heidegger suggests, to have a dual meaning–both the sense of a location, or a dwelling alongside, and a kind of absorption, or concern for that dwelling–then the world would be the space wherein Dasein finds itself concernfully located. Dasein is principally absorption in the world, or in other words Dasein always already has a world. We are, as it were, faced with a departure from the Cartesian tradition, which has taken Dasein’s relation to the world to be one of a knower to the objects of knowledge. In Heidegger’s account Dasein’s Being-in is inseparable from World in that Dasein always already understands itself in terms of its environment, which constitutes a kind of field of familiarity to which Dasein has recourse. Notice that this Being-in-the-World is not a theoretical standing before, nor an epistemological relation between a subject and a world of objects but an existential modality of Dasein’s Being-in.
Dasein, therefore, is always already concernfully situated in the world and always already understands itself environmentally in terms of a totality of possible involvements. Dasein’s Being-in-the-World, is not conceived nor perceived in a manner present-at-hand, but rather, Dasein is always already Being-in-the-World. Dasein’s facticity is such that it comports itself in terms of the entities it finds within the world, and expresses itself in terms of its Being-in-the-World as its primary mode of Being.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Merleau-Ponty and The New Sense of Sense
“We must therefore recognize as an ultimate fact this open and indefinite power of giving significance—that is, both of apprehending and conveying a meaning—by which man transcends himself towards an new form of behavior, or towards other people, or towards his own thought, through his body and his speech”(RKP 226).
How might we recognize that which may, or may not be cognizable? Does re-cognition demand, or require an original cognition? Or, can our recognition fulfill itself in a deferral to the possibility of a future cognition? In the quote above, Merleau-Ponty suggests that we attend to the factuality, rather the ultimate factuality, of this “open and indefinite power” which is donative in that it bestows a sense[i] that can be both apprehended and communicated in turn. Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion, however, is suggestive in a different sense, in that we obviously don’t need to recognize this power in order for it to remain operant. That is, this power we have is ultimately not founded upon its cognizability, and while Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion points to the possibility that it be subjected to a kind of viewing, it does not require it in order to function. This power, which it is our task to recognize, is simultaneously that by which man outstrips himself into novel modes of habitus, new ways of being towards others and himself, and that which constitutes a sense into a community of speaking subjects. This power is a corporeal power, which can be lived, and/or we can try to understand it through recourse to the auxiliary verbs of ‘being’ and ‘having.’[ii] The examination that follows will engage with this power, insofar as it is manifest in the movement of expression and in the case of acts of speech (parole). It will furthermore deal with the most important gestures Merleau-Ponty makes in the chapter “The Body As Expression and Speech.” In the first place he maintains, in opposition to the tradition, that “the word has a meaning”[iii], that is that the word has both a gestural meaning (sens) and a cognitive one. In the second place, he argues that there is not a series of words, which we might view from above from some third person standpoint, but rather, a speaking subject who is always a particular way, or ‘style’[iv] of speaking the words. Merleau-Ponty argues, that it is not thought which subtends, or immediately precedes the speaking subject’s act of speech but, rather a silence, a motility, which he comes to refer to as the ‘tacit cogito.’ Furthermore, that speech[v] is exemplary in that it is an act, which constitutes and sediments a new sense into a fabric of constituted language, which in turn rearranges the linguistic field. In other words, speech acts are both constituted, in the form of a new sense, and at the same time constitutive of all subsequent attempts to say, think, express something further. It is therefore the case that the new sense of sense, as constituted, takes its place within, and unfolds as the movement of a tradition. As such the paper that follows will maintain that this relation between the body’s motility and the body’s intelligence which Merleau-Ponty calls fundierung[vi] is this strange power and ‘irrational’ power of the body to be simultaneously apprehending and conveying, appropriative and bestowing, creative and traditional. The new sense of sense that emerges from the movement of expression, is simultaneously a response, or a reaction, to an existing tradition and the creating of a new sediment within a tradition. Speech acts, therefore are traditionalized/traditionalizing movements.
Motor Intentionality and the Paradox of Existence
It seems to be the case that one the most important developments of The Phenomenology of Perception is, in the first place, that we rid ourselves of the primacy of the conceptual order and come to see that there is something already at work in advance of our attempts to conceptualize the content of experience. Merleau-Ponty presents us with a clear statement a kind of manifesto of the project at hand, when he says:
“The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them or the symbolic function which breathes life into them, a relationship which shall be neither a reduction of form to content, nor the subsuming of content under an autonomous form” (RKP 145).
If, as Merleau-Ponty says, “The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them…a relationship…”[vii] and come to the realization that whatever this “relationship” might be, it is not solely conceptual, and neither is it purely motor and neither should the conceptual be our privileged mode of engagement with it.[viii] We must recognize that the conceptual order—or the symbolizing power of abstraction and generalization—is founded upon a perception, or the pure apprehending of motor phenomena. The Phenomenology of Perception makes a departure from the tradition of phenomenology, in that it no longer seeks the “explanatory invariant” in the form of the transcendental ego.[ix] Rather, Merleau-Ponty locates a motor intentionality, [x] a motor power, or a movement, which is simultaneously an active apprehending and a passive appropriation. Herein we find the important notion of fundierung, which names the relation between content and form[xi]. In this relation it becomes possible to say that the visual contents of perception are appropriated and sublimated by a symbolic function, which is simultaneously founded upon these contents and beyond them. What we have, therefore, is a kind of dialectical movement between content and form, which is constitutive of sense. Merleau-Ponty proposes firstly, that this movement is a contradiction, and secondly, that it can make sense only as a lived relation. It is important to note that we live the world before we come to see it as something questionable, and that this motor, or operant, intentionality gives us a motor significance upon which our capacity for generalization and the conceptual order are based. This intentionality is non-ideational, yet meaningful in that it deploys a certain field of experienceablity. Although pre-conceptual, our affective life as embodied beings, is no less rich than the conceptual, or secondary, way of existing. Furthermore, the fact that our existence is as embodied, makes us simultaneously “an object for others and a subject for myself”[xii]. This conceptual paradox disappears at the level of lived experience. Existence, therefore, is but another name for the dialectic between content and form, or the[xiii] fundierung, the “ambiguous setting”[xiv]wherein they intersect and overlap. As such, fundierung, perhaps deployed in order to gesture toward a certain space, cannot possibly name the space towards which it gestures, rather it is the apprehension of a movement, between the body’s motility and intelligence, a movement which is either everything, or nothing, or perhaps is already everything and nothing.
The Sense of the Word
Merleau-Ponty’s account of expression refutes the tradition “by simply saying that the word has a meaning”[xv]. This statement is definitive in its radicality, that is, it allows for a genuine departure from the empiricist and the intellectualist who are united in that they both maintain that the word is without meaning. For the Empiricist, the word is solely an appendage to the objective world; it stands for an association made in the objective world. For the intellectualist, the word is simply the external container of some internal thought, which was already accomplished in advance. Words, for Merleau-Ponty, are not “passive shells”, but active gestures in that they point, just as a bodily movement would point out something to oneself, or to another. There is not a thought before the movement of speech, but rather, this gestural sense is immanent in the movement of speech itself, and is that from which the conceptual sense of the word is derived.[xvi] There is beneath, or subtending “the conceptual meaning of words, an existential meaning” which inhabits the words themselves.[xvii] The body has these words as so many possibilities of itself, as orientational devices, which it can draw from and deploy in the achievement of some intention to express, or to mean something or other. These words, for Merleau-Ponty are centers of an incredible power that brings with it the entirety of the past forward in the movement of speech: “words into which the history of a whole language is compressed, and which effect communication with no absolute guarantee, dogged as they are by incredible linguistic hazards.[xviii] As such, these words are both natural and cultural, in that they are capable of gesturing toward the novelties of the perceptual world, but retain within themselves the cultural backgrounds from which they have emerged as former acts of expression. Each word is the result of a speech act, an accomplished intention to signify, to speak, to say, to articulate, a point of view, a perspective of the world, into the world of previously constituted speech and gestures. Language cannot be made to behave like any particular object; rather, it becomes meaningful when a speaking subject is engaged in it with others.
Apprehension and Appropriation
I am, at first, struck by the ‘style’ of that which unfolds before me. In the movement of coming to understand it conceptually, I am moved by its rhythm, its tempo, the harmonious flow of its melody. Provided I have ears, which can hear it, I can attend to the suggestion of its harmonics, to the reverberations of sound, which envelop me such that I cannot attend to anything else. I can attend to these rhythms because I share them; they are my rhythms, the sounds of the world that I live alongside others. My body is my capacity to attend in this manner, my capacity to be moved and to move, to partake in the movement of something that transcends me. This gestural significance of the word presents us with a ‘style’ of signification, which constitutes a first draft of meaning. As part of our movement, we are faced with the task of taking up this ‘style’ of expressivity in a paradoxical process of appropriation. This movement of appropriation is paradoxical in the sense that my intention, seeking realization, must come to expression through a sedimented linguistic tradition of already meaningful speech, that is, through a speech, through words, that already have a given sense. The apprehension of a gestural sense, “is not given, but understood, that is, recaptured by an act on the spectators part.”[xix] The gesture arises as a question upon my horizon, as an indeterminate something that solicits my attention, and my bodily capacity to move and to bring myself into accordance with it and the other whose gesture inhabits me. The body is that which converts “a certain motor essence” into phonation by deploying the articulatory style of a word, taking up its past, and projecting it in an effective intentional gesture.[xx] A comprehension of the object has been appropriated when, through the movement of concordance between my intention and that of the other, “the powers of my body adjust themselves to it and overlap it.”[xxi] The word therefore, “has a meaning ” perhaps even meanings, which points once again to the relation between these senses:
“…there are different layers of significance, from the visual to the conceptual by way of the verbal concept. These two ideas will never be simultaneously understood unless we cease to vacillate between the notions of ‘motility’ and ‘intelligence,’ unless we discover a third notion which enables us to integrate them…”(RKP 227).
Silence and the Illusion of Thought Before Speech
There is not a thought before speech, but rather a “silence… alive with words.”[xxii] Even further the silence is alive with feelings. The chapter on “The Body in its Sexual Being” points to this ambiguous life which subtends the conceptual order, it is a field of sexuality which is an original intentionality. Merleau-Ponty declares that “the body expresses existence at every moment, that is, in the sense in which the word expresses thought.”[xxiii] This silence, which precedes speech, is our opening onto the world, our feeling our way about in the world and with others, it is the excess, the overflow of our being, which always allows us to go further, to transcend the here and the now that we are as embodied beings. It is not a thought that precedes speech but rather, what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the tacit cogito, the body’s motility, which is our silent presence in a world, which is always constituted in advance.[xxiv] The illusion of thought before speech resides in the fields of sedimented language wherein the tacit cogito resides. Secondary speech, or the sedimentations of spoken speech (parole parlé) comprises the totality of exchanges having taken place in a language, which have determined the language in precisely the way it is encountered. The language itself, however, encountered in the realm of meaningful silence, opens up as a field of possibility for the tacit cogito which seeks to realize itself as a cogito through the movement of the speaking cogito. Pure thought, therefore, as Merleau-Ponty says “reduces itself to a certain void of consciousness, to a momentary desire.”[xxv] This “signicative intention,”[xxvi] which precedes expression, is the “lack,” or a kind of “blind expectation” which reshuffles the given sense in a movement of appropriation towards a sense of its own which it will be able to express in a subsequent speech act. It is precisely for this reason that Merleau-Ponty points toward the writer who begins his work in ignorance of what he will “put into it,” or the thinking subject who is ignorant of his thought until his has expressed it in writing, or in speech.[xxvii] The word is not in the first place a word offered to a consciousness composed of words, but rather a motor word soliciting a silent desire to express. We are, as it were, presented with a meaningful silence in speech, a silence interwoven in the fabric of words. We must attend to, or engage with this overflow of significance, this silence, which is present in a kind of absence. When a ‘gesture’ is made, it forces us to reckon with “a certain structural co-ordination of experience, a certain modulation of existence, exactly as a pattern of my bodily behavior endows objects around me with a certain significance both for me and for others.”[xxviii] Our motility, therefore, appears to be a kind of living history, such that the past is present in my being towards the world, informed as it is by the acquisition of successful practices and habits. It seems to be the case, therefore, that the world is mediated by these habits[xxix], which are cultivated, that is incorporated, or perhaps, even appropriated pre-reflectively. Our motility, therefore, seems to be an informed historical movement and my reflective access to it is necessarily marked by ambiguity. It is furthermore the case that we are never truly an object for ourselves, but rather an opening, we are never what we have been, rather we are an excess over what we have already come to understand, such that we remain, so long as we are alive, in a constant movement beyond ourselves.
Speech and the Movement of Expression
In the case of speech, Merleau-Ponty maintains: “it cannot be said of speech either that it is an ‘operation of intelligence,’ or that it is a ‘motor phenomenon’: it is wholly motility and wholly intelligence.”[xxx] That this is the case can be demonstrated through recourse to pathologies of speech, such as aphasia[xxxi] and alexia,[xxxii] or specifically in the case of Schneider[xxxiii] who seems to be incapable of projecting himself into a situation of any kind. His experience never seems questionable, thus it never tends toward speech. His language is no longer an instrument, but rather presents him with a kind of self-evidence such that he never seeks to go beyond himself.[xxxiv] In short language is a living relation with the world and other which manifests as an open situation, which can seemingly close, if only for a moment, before re-opens of its own accord. For Schneider, the situation is already closed, his language is fixed, no questions come to mind because nothing is questionable. In the non-pathological case, however there is a linguistic field from which we all borrow in order to combine an intentional desire with a speech act in the constitution of an object for ourselves and for others, thereby accomplishing thought by conveying a certain ‘style’ into a community of speakers. The movement of expression sediments its acts and constitutes a world of shared contextualities and experiences and becomes the shared background from which all sense is made. The movement of expression, which attempts to express the previously unexpressed, brings about a new sense, through “an organism of words, establishing it in the writer, or the reader as a new sense organ, opening an new field or a new dimension to our experience.”[xxxv] This new sense is apprehended in the world it opens up, in the possibilities it makes manifest, in the ways it reorganizes the past in terms of itself and a future it seems to make possible. It is not literally there contained in the words it uses, but rather is contained in the space between the speaker and the listener, between the gestural and conceptual meanings, between words and the world. It is precisely in this sense that Merleau-Ponty declares that “The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.”[xxxvi] Authentic expression takes aim at the unsayable, the previously unexpressed, otherwise it remains in the sedimentations of already spoken speech. However, all the same this authentic expression requires the sediment in order to go further, in order to forget the contingency involved in its own achievement. An authentic speech act brings something new before us, something above and beyond what we already had at our disposal, we must reckon with its novelty in order to go further. In order to understand what was said, we must come to appropriate it into a fresh movement of our bodily motility. This movement between motility and intelligence is our movement, the movement of the body, such that it is the body, which, in order to express, “must in the last analysis become the thought or intention that it signifies for us.”[xxxvii]
Language and the New Sense of Sense
Language, like sexuality, is an originating realm, that this realization comes late, is due in no small part to the sense of language itself. Language is peculiar in what it affords, and the movement it makes possible. Language is a traditionalized/ traditionalizing structure, in that it alone “is able to settle into sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in human relationships.”[xxxviii] In short, speech acts re-organize the fabric of the linguistic totality, such that speech becomes the basis upon which further acts of speech are made possible. Speech serves to ground itself upon itself, such that we may have speech about speech in ways that “it is impossible to paint about painting.”[xxxix] In each case the contingencies involved in particular acts of speech get covered over in a functioning that conceals itself in its acts. It therefore, becomes true to say that we treat linguistic virtualities, contingent developments of speech, as necessary abstractions in the development of our linguistic edifices. In our attempts to express our perception, say who and what we are, or to engage in a cultural space, we are, as it were, faced with these linguistic virtualities which we come to treat as idealities.
“Speech is the surplus of our existence over natural being. But the act of expression constitutes a linguistic world and a cultural world, and allows that to fall back into being which was striving to outstrip it. Hence the spoken word enjoys available significance as one might enjoy an aquired fortune. From these gains the other acts of authentic expression—the writer’s, artist’s or philosopher’s—are made possible.”[xl]
Ultimately, we find ourselves in the midst of traditionalized structures, which further their agendas through our acts, or whose agendas we thwart through our acts. There are traditions we are aware of other than we are not, in any case, our explicit awareness is not necessary in order for them to function, as it were, behind our back and in our wakes. We might be amidst a revolution, or part of a reformation, or a rectification, whose environs we are scarcely aware of, and whose results have yet to be written, as if they could ever be settled permanently. We live in fields of fields and upon histories, which we do not choose, but reckon with in each and every movement of our bodily existence.
Conclusion
If we return to the quote provided at the start of the current examination, having gone through the movement of expression, we might have something further to say about it. This awesome power we have to “give significance” and to appropriate and convey this significance into a community of speaking subjects is nothing more than the power of our existence itself. The attempts to say what it is, presupposes that this power is a thing that we might arrest and cognize. It seems that our language allows us to grasp things whose truth does not truly reside in the order of things, but in the movement of living. This is simply part of the awesome power of language and the significance of sense bestowal. We live in and contribute to a world of shared meaning, which emerge out of and shape our speech acts. Our lived body draws together this ‘motility and ‘intelligence,’ these diverse fields of experience. The motility of our being is such that it acts out its acquisitions, in patterns of behavior and speech. Our own body gives us others, a world, a particular ‘style’ of being; it expresses an attitude; bridges distances, and reduces gaps, between itself, others and the world. Gaps remain, allowing us to go further, to transcend ourselves and our apprehensions, allowing us the capacity to go beyond the previously said, or the already acquired. We live in the wake of thoughts given to us by our contemporaries and our predecessors, our movement is to appropriate them. We give meaning to ourselves, borrowing from and giving to others, and live in accordance with these meanings. The body is that lived unity which cannot be understood reflectively, rather requires that it be lived.
Endnotes
[i] I would like to maintain the ambiguity of the French word <> which imparts with a sense of direction and also with the English words ‘meaning’ and ‘significance.’
[ii] If we are attentive to the quote at the onset the chapter on “The Body as Expression and Speech” we are therein provided with the clearest account of what these verbs are intended to show. “…being, the weak sense of existence as a thing, or that of predication…’having’ for the relation which the subject bears to the term into which it projects itself…” Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. P. 202.
[iii] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 206.
[iv] ‘Style,’ for Merleau-Ponty, denotes the immanent affective impact of gestures. In other words, style would be the originary pre-conceptual encounter with meaning. His best accounts of style appear on Ibid., p. 208, 212.
[v] We must be careful to note Merleau-Ponty’s footnote which makes an important distinction between an ‘authentic speech’ and a secondary speech. Ibid., p. 207.
[vi] Fundierung, already part of the phenomenological tradition pre-dating Merleau-Ponty, appears to be a first draft of the important idea of reversibility that occupies him in his later works. See M.C. Dillon. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Evanstown: Northwestern University Press, 1988. p 206.
[vii] Ibid., p 145. My italics
[viii] If there are certain tensions involved in the argument of The Phenomenology of Perception, perhaps an implicit privileging of the conceptual over the pre-conceptual, this is only in light of the trajectory we can see at work in the general movement of Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole. That is the contingent developments of the work undertaken in The Phenomenology of Perception can appear as mistaken, or essential, only when we reflect upon them in the light of his later work. If he appears too Cartesian in this work it is only in relation to how effectively he resolves his Cartesian tensions in the later works.
[ix] Merleau-Ponty seems to be searching for a kind of invariant in flux an invariant simultaneously capable of variation. Ibid., 139
[x] Merleau-Ponty attributes this discovery to Edmund Husserl and equates ‘motor intentionality’ with the movement of existence. Husserl’s treatment of it appears only in his posthumous works. Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 140.
[xi] Ibid., p. 146
[xii] Ibid., p. 194
[xiii]
[xiv] Ibid., p. 193
[xv] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 206
[xvi] Ibid., p. 208.
[xvii] Ibid., p. 212.
[xviii] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 218.
[xix]Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 215.
[xx] Ibid., p. 211.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 215.
[xxii] Ibid., p. 213.
[xxiii] Ibid., p. 192.
[xxiv] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 470.
[xxv] Ibid., p. 213.
[xxvi] In the later works Merleau-Ponty expresses a similar thought by using the terms <>
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 206.
[xxviii] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 225.
[xxix] These habits lurk behind and contribute to the things we simply take for granted. They determine in advance our sense of ontics.
[xxx] Ibid., p. 226.
[xxxi] Aphasia is a loss in the general ability to comprehend and produce language, it is a motor phenomenon in that it does not manifest as an intellectual deficit.
[xxxii] Alexia is word blindness resulting in a loss in the ability to read and recognize printed words in general.
[xxxiii] A patient of Gelb and Goldstein whose pathology, stems from an injury to the occipital region of his brain, has impaired what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the ‘intentional arc’
[xxxiv] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 228.
[xxxv] Ibid., p. 212.
[xxxvi] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 214.
[xxxvii] Ibid., p. 230.
[xxxviii] Ibid., p. 221.
[xxxix] Ibid., p. 221.
[xl] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 229.
How might we recognize that which may, or may not be cognizable? Does re-cognition demand, or require an original cognition? Or, can our recognition fulfill itself in a deferral to the possibility of a future cognition? In the quote above, Merleau-Ponty suggests that we attend to the factuality, rather the ultimate factuality, of this “open and indefinite power” which is donative in that it bestows a sense[i] that can be both apprehended and communicated in turn. Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion, however, is suggestive in a different sense, in that we obviously don’t need to recognize this power in order for it to remain operant. That is, this power we have is ultimately not founded upon its cognizability, and while Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion points to the possibility that it be subjected to a kind of viewing, it does not require it in order to function. This power, which it is our task to recognize, is simultaneously that by which man outstrips himself into novel modes of habitus, new ways of being towards others and himself, and that which constitutes a sense into a community of speaking subjects. This power is a corporeal power, which can be lived, and/or we can try to understand it through recourse to the auxiliary verbs of ‘being’ and ‘having.’[ii] The examination that follows will engage with this power, insofar as it is manifest in the movement of expression and in the case of acts of speech (parole). It will furthermore deal with the most important gestures Merleau-Ponty makes in the chapter “The Body As Expression and Speech.” In the first place he maintains, in opposition to the tradition, that “the word has a meaning”[iii], that is that the word has both a gestural meaning (sens) and a cognitive one. In the second place, he argues that there is not a series of words, which we might view from above from some third person standpoint, but rather, a speaking subject who is always a particular way, or ‘style’[iv] of speaking the words. Merleau-Ponty argues, that it is not thought which subtends, or immediately precedes the speaking subject’s act of speech but, rather a silence, a motility, which he comes to refer to as the ‘tacit cogito.’ Furthermore, that speech[v] is exemplary in that it is an act, which constitutes and sediments a new sense into a fabric of constituted language, which in turn rearranges the linguistic field. In other words, speech acts are both constituted, in the form of a new sense, and at the same time constitutive of all subsequent attempts to say, think, express something further. It is therefore the case that the new sense of sense, as constituted, takes its place within, and unfolds as the movement of a tradition. As such the paper that follows will maintain that this relation between the body’s motility and the body’s intelligence which Merleau-Ponty calls fundierung[vi] is this strange power and ‘irrational’ power of the body to be simultaneously apprehending and conveying, appropriative and bestowing, creative and traditional. The new sense of sense that emerges from the movement of expression, is simultaneously a response, or a reaction, to an existing tradition and the creating of a new sediment within a tradition. Speech acts, therefore are traditionalized/traditionalizing movements.
Motor Intentionality and the Paradox of Existence
It seems to be the case that one the most important developments of The Phenomenology of Perception is, in the first place, that we rid ourselves of the primacy of the conceptual order and come to see that there is something already at work in advance of our attempts to conceptualize the content of experience. Merleau-Ponty presents us with a clear statement a kind of manifesto of the project at hand, when he says:
“The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them or the symbolic function which breathes life into them, a relationship which shall be neither a reduction of form to content, nor the subsuming of content under an autonomous form” (RKP 145).
If, as Merleau-Ponty says, “The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them…a relationship…”[vii] and come to the realization that whatever this “relationship” might be, it is not solely conceptual, and neither is it purely motor and neither should the conceptual be our privileged mode of engagement with it.[viii] We must recognize that the conceptual order—or the symbolizing power of abstraction and generalization—is founded upon a perception, or the pure apprehending of motor phenomena. The Phenomenology of Perception makes a departure from the tradition of phenomenology, in that it no longer seeks the “explanatory invariant” in the form of the transcendental ego.[ix] Rather, Merleau-Ponty locates a motor intentionality, [x] a motor power, or a movement, which is simultaneously an active apprehending and a passive appropriation. Herein we find the important notion of fundierung, which names the relation between content and form[xi]. In this relation it becomes possible to say that the visual contents of perception are appropriated and sublimated by a symbolic function, which is simultaneously founded upon these contents and beyond them. What we have, therefore, is a kind of dialectical movement between content and form, which is constitutive of sense. Merleau-Ponty proposes firstly, that this movement is a contradiction, and secondly, that it can make sense only as a lived relation. It is important to note that we live the world before we come to see it as something questionable, and that this motor, or operant, intentionality gives us a motor significance upon which our capacity for generalization and the conceptual order are based. This intentionality is non-ideational, yet meaningful in that it deploys a certain field of experienceablity. Although pre-conceptual, our affective life as embodied beings, is no less rich than the conceptual, or secondary, way of existing. Furthermore, the fact that our existence is as embodied, makes us simultaneously “an object for others and a subject for myself”[xii]. This conceptual paradox disappears at the level of lived experience. Existence, therefore, is but another name for the dialectic between content and form, or the[xiii] fundierung, the “ambiguous setting”[xiv]wherein they intersect and overlap. As such, fundierung, perhaps deployed in order to gesture toward a certain space, cannot possibly name the space towards which it gestures, rather it is the apprehension of a movement, between the body’s motility and intelligence, a movement which is either everything, or nothing, or perhaps is already everything and nothing.
The Sense of the Word
Merleau-Ponty’s account of expression refutes the tradition “by simply saying that the word has a meaning”[xv]. This statement is definitive in its radicality, that is, it allows for a genuine departure from the empiricist and the intellectualist who are united in that they both maintain that the word is without meaning. For the Empiricist, the word is solely an appendage to the objective world; it stands for an association made in the objective world. For the intellectualist, the word is simply the external container of some internal thought, which was already accomplished in advance. Words, for Merleau-Ponty, are not “passive shells”, but active gestures in that they point, just as a bodily movement would point out something to oneself, or to another. There is not a thought before the movement of speech, but rather, this gestural sense is immanent in the movement of speech itself, and is that from which the conceptual sense of the word is derived.[xvi] There is beneath, or subtending “the conceptual meaning of words, an existential meaning” which inhabits the words themselves.[xvii] The body has these words as so many possibilities of itself, as orientational devices, which it can draw from and deploy in the achievement of some intention to express, or to mean something or other. These words, for Merleau-Ponty are centers of an incredible power that brings with it the entirety of the past forward in the movement of speech: “words into which the history of a whole language is compressed, and which effect communication with no absolute guarantee, dogged as they are by incredible linguistic hazards.[xviii] As such, these words are both natural and cultural, in that they are capable of gesturing toward the novelties of the perceptual world, but retain within themselves the cultural backgrounds from which they have emerged as former acts of expression. Each word is the result of a speech act, an accomplished intention to signify, to speak, to say, to articulate, a point of view, a perspective of the world, into the world of previously constituted speech and gestures. Language cannot be made to behave like any particular object; rather, it becomes meaningful when a speaking subject is engaged in it with others.
Apprehension and Appropriation
I am, at first, struck by the ‘style’ of that which unfolds before me. In the movement of coming to understand it conceptually, I am moved by its rhythm, its tempo, the harmonious flow of its melody. Provided I have ears, which can hear it, I can attend to the suggestion of its harmonics, to the reverberations of sound, which envelop me such that I cannot attend to anything else. I can attend to these rhythms because I share them; they are my rhythms, the sounds of the world that I live alongside others. My body is my capacity to attend in this manner, my capacity to be moved and to move, to partake in the movement of something that transcends me. This gestural significance of the word presents us with a ‘style’ of signification, which constitutes a first draft of meaning. As part of our movement, we are faced with the task of taking up this ‘style’ of expressivity in a paradoxical process of appropriation. This movement of appropriation is paradoxical in the sense that my intention, seeking realization, must come to expression through a sedimented linguistic tradition of already meaningful speech, that is, through a speech, through words, that already have a given sense. The apprehension of a gestural sense, “is not given, but understood, that is, recaptured by an act on the spectators part.”[xix] The gesture arises as a question upon my horizon, as an indeterminate something that solicits my attention, and my bodily capacity to move and to bring myself into accordance with it and the other whose gesture inhabits me. The body is that which converts “a certain motor essence” into phonation by deploying the articulatory style of a word, taking up its past, and projecting it in an effective intentional gesture.[xx] A comprehension of the object has been appropriated when, through the movement of concordance between my intention and that of the other, “the powers of my body adjust themselves to it and overlap it.”[xxi] The word therefore, “has a meaning ” perhaps even meanings, which points once again to the relation between these senses:
“…there are different layers of significance, from the visual to the conceptual by way of the verbal concept. These two ideas will never be simultaneously understood unless we cease to vacillate between the notions of ‘motility’ and ‘intelligence,’ unless we discover a third notion which enables us to integrate them…”(RKP 227).
Silence and the Illusion of Thought Before Speech
There is not a thought before speech, but rather a “silence… alive with words.”[xxii] Even further the silence is alive with feelings. The chapter on “The Body in its Sexual Being” points to this ambiguous life which subtends the conceptual order, it is a field of sexuality which is an original intentionality. Merleau-Ponty declares that “the body expresses existence at every moment, that is, in the sense in which the word expresses thought.”[xxiii] This silence, which precedes speech, is our opening onto the world, our feeling our way about in the world and with others, it is the excess, the overflow of our being, which always allows us to go further, to transcend the here and the now that we are as embodied beings. It is not a thought that precedes speech but rather, what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the tacit cogito, the body’s motility, which is our silent presence in a world, which is always constituted in advance.[xxiv] The illusion of thought before speech resides in the fields of sedimented language wherein the tacit cogito resides. Secondary speech, or the sedimentations of spoken speech (parole parlé) comprises the totality of exchanges having taken place in a language, which have determined the language in precisely the way it is encountered. The language itself, however, encountered in the realm of meaningful silence, opens up as a field of possibility for the tacit cogito which seeks to realize itself as a cogito through the movement of the speaking cogito. Pure thought, therefore, as Merleau-Ponty says “reduces itself to a certain void of consciousness, to a momentary desire.”[xxv] This “signicative intention,”[xxvi] which precedes expression, is the “lack,” or a kind of “blind expectation” which reshuffles the given sense in a movement of appropriation towards a sense of its own which it will be able to express in a subsequent speech act. It is precisely for this reason that Merleau-Ponty points toward the writer who begins his work in ignorance of what he will “put into it,” or the thinking subject who is ignorant of his thought until his has expressed it in writing, or in speech.[xxvii] The word is not in the first place a word offered to a consciousness composed of words, but rather a motor word soliciting a silent desire to express. We are, as it were, presented with a meaningful silence in speech, a silence interwoven in the fabric of words. We must attend to, or engage with this overflow of significance, this silence, which is present in a kind of absence. When a ‘gesture’ is made, it forces us to reckon with “a certain structural co-ordination of experience, a certain modulation of existence, exactly as a pattern of my bodily behavior endows objects around me with a certain significance both for me and for others.”[xxviii] Our motility, therefore, appears to be a kind of living history, such that the past is present in my being towards the world, informed as it is by the acquisition of successful practices and habits. It seems to be the case, therefore, that the world is mediated by these habits[xxix], which are cultivated, that is incorporated, or perhaps, even appropriated pre-reflectively. Our motility, therefore, seems to be an informed historical movement and my reflective access to it is necessarily marked by ambiguity. It is furthermore the case that we are never truly an object for ourselves, but rather an opening, we are never what we have been, rather we are an excess over what we have already come to understand, such that we remain, so long as we are alive, in a constant movement beyond ourselves.
Speech and the Movement of Expression
In the case of speech, Merleau-Ponty maintains: “it cannot be said of speech either that it is an ‘operation of intelligence,’ or that it is a ‘motor phenomenon’: it is wholly motility and wholly intelligence.”[xxx] That this is the case can be demonstrated through recourse to pathologies of speech, such as aphasia[xxxi] and alexia,[xxxii] or specifically in the case of Schneider[xxxiii] who seems to be incapable of projecting himself into a situation of any kind. His experience never seems questionable, thus it never tends toward speech. His language is no longer an instrument, but rather presents him with a kind of self-evidence such that he never seeks to go beyond himself.[xxxiv] In short language is a living relation with the world and other which manifests as an open situation, which can seemingly close, if only for a moment, before re-opens of its own accord. For Schneider, the situation is already closed, his language is fixed, no questions come to mind because nothing is questionable. In the non-pathological case, however there is a linguistic field from which we all borrow in order to combine an intentional desire with a speech act in the constitution of an object for ourselves and for others, thereby accomplishing thought by conveying a certain ‘style’ into a community of speakers. The movement of expression sediments its acts and constitutes a world of shared contextualities and experiences and becomes the shared background from which all sense is made. The movement of expression, which attempts to express the previously unexpressed, brings about a new sense, through “an organism of words, establishing it in the writer, or the reader as a new sense organ, opening an new field or a new dimension to our experience.”[xxxv] This new sense is apprehended in the world it opens up, in the possibilities it makes manifest, in the ways it reorganizes the past in terms of itself and a future it seems to make possible. It is not literally there contained in the words it uses, but rather is contained in the space between the speaker and the listener, between the gestural and conceptual meanings, between words and the world. It is precisely in this sense that Merleau-Ponty declares that “The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.”[xxxvi] Authentic expression takes aim at the unsayable, the previously unexpressed, otherwise it remains in the sedimentations of already spoken speech. However, all the same this authentic expression requires the sediment in order to go further, in order to forget the contingency involved in its own achievement. An authentic speech act brings something new before us, something above and beyond what we already had at our disposal, we must reckon with its novelty in order to go further. In order to understand what was said, we must come to appropriate it into a fresh movement of our bodily motility. This movement between motility and intelligence is our movement, the movement of the body, such that it is the body, which, in order to express, “must in the last analysis become the thought or intention that it signifies for us.”[xxxvii]
Language and the New Sense of Sense
Language, like sexuality, is an originating realm, that this realization comes late, is due in no small part to the sense of language itself. Language is peculiar in what it affords, and the movement it makes possible. Language is a traditionalized/ traditionalizing structure, in that it alone “is able to settle into sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in human relationships.”[xxxviii] In short, speech acts re-organize the fabric of the linguistic totality, such that speech becomes the basis upon which further acts of speech are made possible. Speech serves to ground itself upon itself, such that we may have speech about speech in ways that “it is impossible to paint about painting.”[xxxix] In each case the contingencies involved in particular acts of speech get covered over in a functioning that conceals itself in its acts. It therefore, becomes true to say that we treat linguistic virtualities, contingent developments of speech, as necessary abstractions in the development of our linguistic edifices. In our attempts to express our perception, say who and what we are, or to engage in a cultural space, we are, as it were, faced with these linguistic virtualities which we come to treat as idealities.
“Speech is the surplus of our existence over natural being. But the act of expression constitutes a linguistic world and a cultural world, and allows that to fall back into being which was striving to outstrip it. Hence the spoken word enjoys available significance as one might enjoy an aquired fortune. From these gains the other acts of authentic expression—the writer’s, artist’s or philosopher’s—are made possible.”[xl]
Ultimately, we find ourselves in the midst of traditionalized structures, which further their agendas through our acts, or whose agendas we thwart through our acts. There are traditions we are aware of other than we are not, in any case, our explicit awareness is not necessary in order for them to function, as it were, behind our back and in our wakes. We might be amidst a revolution, or part of a reformation, or a rectification, whose environs we are scarcely aware of, and whose results have yet to be written, as if they could ever be settled permanently. We live in fields of fields and upon histories, which we do not choose, but reckon with in each and every movement of our bodily existence.
Conclusion
If we return to the quote provided at the start of the current examination, having gone through the movement of expression, we might have something further to say about it. This awesome power we have to “give significance” and to appropriate and convey this significance into a community of speaking subjects is nothing more than the power of our existence itself. The attempts to say what it is, presupposes that this power is a thing that we might arrest and cognize. It seems that our language allows us to grasp things whose truth does not truly reside in the order of things, but in the movement of living. This is simply part of the awesome power of language and the significance of sense bestowal. We live in and contribute to a world of shared meaning, which emerge out of and shape our speech acts. Our lived body draws together this ‘motility and ‘intelligence,’ these diverse fields of experience. The motility of our being is such that it acts out its acquisitions, in patterns of behavior and speech. Our own body gives us others, a world, a particular ‘style’ of being; it expresses an attitude; bridges distances, and reduces gaps, between itself, others and the world. Gaps remain, allowing us to go further, to transcend ourselves and our apprehensions, allowing us the capacity to go beyond the previously said, or the already acquired. We live in the wake of thoughts given to us by our contemporaries and our predecessors, our movement is to appropriate them. We give meaning to ourselves, borrowing from and giving to others, and live in accordance with these meanings. The body is that lived unity which cannot be understood reflectively, rather requires that it be lived.
Endnotes
[i] I would like to maintain the ambiguity of the French word <
[ii] If we are attentive to the quote at the onset the chapter on “The Body as Expression and Speech” we are therein provided with the clearest account of what these verbs are intended to show. “…being, the weak sense of existence as a thing, or that of predication…’having’ for the relation which the subject bears to the term into which it projects itself…” Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. P. 202.
[iii] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 206.
[iv] ‘Style,’ for Merleau-Ponty, denotes the immanent affective impact of gestures. In other words, style would be the originary pre-conceptual encounter with meaning. His best accounts of style appear on Ibid., p. 208, 212.
[v] We must be careful to note Merleau-Ponty’s footnote which makes an important distinction between an ‘authentic speech’ and a secondary speech. Ibid., p. 207.
[vi] Fundierung, already part of the phenomenological tradition pre-dating Merleau-Ponty, appears to be a first draft of the important idea of reversibility that occupies him in his later works. See M.C. Dillon. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Evanstown: Northwestern University Press, 1988. p 206.
[vii] Ibid., p 145. My italics
[viii] If there are certain tensions involved in the argument of The Phenomenology of Perception, perhaps an implicit privileging of the conceptual over the pre-conceptual, this is only in light of the trajectory we can see at work in the general movement of Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole. That is the contingent developments of the work undertaken in The Phenomenology of Perception can appear as mistaken, or essential, only when we reflect upon them in the light of his later work. If he appears too Cartesian in this work it is only in relation to how effectively he resolves his Cartesian tensions in the later works.
[ix] Merleau-Ponty seems to be searching for a kind of invariant in flux an invariant simultaneously capable of variation. Ibid., 139
[x] Merleau-Ponty attributes this discovery to Edmund Husserl and equates ‘motor intentionality’ with the movement of existence. Husserl’s treatment of it appears only in his posthumous works. Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 140.
[xi] Ibid., p. 146
[xii] Ibid., p. 194
[xiii]
[xiv] Ibid., p. 193
[xv] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 206
[xvi] Ibid., p. 208.
[xvii] Ibid., p. 212.
[xviii] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 218.
[xix]Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 215.
[xx] Ibid., p. 211.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 215.
[xxii] Ibid., p. 213.
[xxiii] Ibid., p. 192.
[xxiv] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 470.
[xxv] Ibid., p. 213.
[xxvi] In the later works Merleau-Ponty expresses a similar thought by using the terms <
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 206.
[xxviii] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 225.
[xxix] These habits lurk behind and contribute to the things we simply take for granted. They determine in advance our sense of ontics.
[xxx] Ibid., p. 226.
[xxxi] Aphasia is a loss in the general ability to comprehend and produce language, it is a motor phenomenon in that it does not manifest as an intellectual deficit.
[xxxii] Alexia is word blindness resulting in a loss in the ability to read and recognize printed words in general.
[xxxiii] A patient of Gelb and Goldstein whose pathology, stems from an injury to the occipital region of his brain, has impaired what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the ‘intentional arc’
[xxxiv] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 228.
[xxxv] Ibid., p. 212.
[xxxvi] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 214.
[xxxvii] Ibid., p. 230.
[xxxviii] Ibid., p. 221.
[xxxix] Ibid., p. 221.
[xl] Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. p. 229.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)