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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I would say rather "we don't know anything about matter that precludes it from being a sufficient ground of consciousness."
While physics has understandably focused on the extrinsic nature of matter, a full explanation of the MBP will need to consider the intrinsic nature of matter.
Love it.
Very good. I need to read the whole paper.
Right.
Nonsense.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Conceivability arguments are of no value. For conceivability to be useful, a distinction between conceivability and inconceivability.is required. Is something conceivability in virtue solely that someone can think of its conceivability? If so, then an idea that cannot be thought is an inconceivable idea. This means that all ideas conceived must be conceivable ideas. What then makes for a good 'Concivability Argument'? A good conceivability argument is merely plausible. But a plausible argment is not necessarily enlightening solely for being conceived.
Which brings me to the question WIAMANSE... It is entirely conceivable that if I were someone else I could ask the same question. This conceivability might provoke the conclusion that there is nothing to indicate the non-identical nature of the question. Who ever I am, I am me and therefore not someone else.
1. But, although conceivable, is it plausible?
2. And would the question raised indeed be identical in both content and reality? conceivably not.
It is inconclusively arguable that both are conceivable and plausible. For the purposes of adressing my inquery I must conclude that. WIAMANSE is therefore the wrong question. I am not interested in its conceivability and plausibility or otherwise; the question I seek is not about the conceivability or plausibility of an alternative world. Rather, it is a question about what is the case, undeniably exactly as it is.
Which brings me to the question WIAMANSE... It is entirely conceivable that if I were someone else I could ask the same question. This conceivability might provoke the conclusion that there is nothing to indicate the non-identical nature of the question. Who ever I am, I am me and therefore not someone else.
1. But, although conceivable, is it plausible?
2. And would the question raised indeed be identical in both content and reality? conceivably not.
It is inconclusively arguable that both are conceivable and plausible. For the purposes of adressing my inquery I must conclude that. WIAMANSE is therefore the wrong question. I am not interested in its conceivability and plausibility or otherwise; the question I seek is not about the conceivability or plausibility of an alternative world. Rather, it is a question about what is the case, undeniably exactly as it is.
The question being "Why am I myself and not someone else?," the only response that comes to mind for me is that 'I' cannot be someone else, someone other than the person I experience myself as being and as having been in my remembered past. This holds, I think, for most humans, though not for schizophrenics, persons with multiple personality disorders, and similar fractured conditions of consciousness and mind.
“All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
“All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
ON THE ROAD HOME
It was when I said,
"There is no such thing as the truth,"
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.
You....You said,
"There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth."
Then the tree, at night, began to change,
Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.
It was when I said,
"Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye."
It was when you said,
"The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth;"
It was at that time, that the silence was largest,
And longest, the night was roundest.
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest, and strongest.
Wallace Stevens
It was when I said,
"There is no such thing as the truth,"
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.
You....You said,
"There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth."
Then the tree, at night, began to change,
Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.
It was when I said,
"Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye."
It was when you said,
"The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth;"
It was at that time, that the silence was largest,
And longest, the night was roundest.
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest, and strongest.
Wallace Stevens
THIS SOLITUDE OF CATARACTS
He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing
Through many places, as if it stood still in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,
Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.
There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.
There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.
He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,
Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest
In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,
Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,
Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.
Wallace Stevens
He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing
Through many places, as if it stood still in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,
Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.
There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.
There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.
He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,
Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest
In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,
Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,
Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.
Wallace Stevens
Stevens also tried on this idea:
Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Wallace Stevens
Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Wallace Stevens
But he could not ultimately transcend in his thinking the source of all we can imagine in that which we sense, encounter, in the actual world of our existence:
NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
And the last poem he placed in The Palm at the End of the Mind, edited by his daughter Holly Stevens near the end of his life, was this one:
Of Mere Being
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
~Wallace Stevens, 1954~
A few comments to aid in the poem's interpretation:
June 3, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Dave Crocco
The key is the seventh and eighth lines. When you have transcended the world you understand, in a way that was not previously possible, that nothing in the world “makes us happy or unhappy”; there is no “it” from which we derive happiness or its opposite. Happiness wells up from within.
His greatest poem.
NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
And the last poem he placed in The Palm at the End of the Mind, edited by his daughter Holly Stevens near the end of his life, was this one:
Of Mere Being
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
~Wallace Stevens, 1954~
A few comments to aid in the poem's interpretation:
June 3, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Dave Crocco
The key is the seventh and eighth lines. When you have transcended the world you understand, in a way that was not previously possible, that nothing in the world “makes us happy or unhappy”; there is no “it” from which we derive happiness or its opposite. Happiness wells up from within.
His greatest poem.
June 13, 2012 at 11:05 am
menumuse
Things in the world certainly make us happy or unhappy, but it is their being that does so, not their meaning, not their reason. fire-fangled feathers (Steven’s language, his song) make us happy, not their meaning, their being. As Picasso said around the same time: do we ask the bird to interpret his song for us? Why the artist? The point is most pointedly not transcendence. “Let be be finale of seem”
Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain
Unsnack your snood, madonna, for the stars
Are shining on all brows of Neversink.
Already the green bird of summer has flown
Away. The night-flies acknowledge these planets,
Predestined to this night, this noise and the place
Of summer. Tomorrow will look like today,
Will appear like it. But it will be an appearance,
A shape left behind, with like wings spreading out,
Brightly empowered with like colors, swarmingly,
But not quite molten, not quite the fluid thing,
A little changed by tips of artifice, changed
By the glints of sound from the grass. These are not
The early constellations, from which came the first
Illustrious intimations -- uncertain love,
The knowledge of being, sense without sense of time.
Take the diamonds from your hair and lay them down.
The deer-grass is thin. The timothy is brown.
The shadow of an external world comes near.
WallaceStevens
Unsnack your snood, madonna, for the stars
Are shining on all brows of Neversink.
Already the green bird of summer has flown
Away. The night-flies acknowledge these planets,
Predestined to this night, this noise and the place
Of summer. Tomorrow will look like today,
Will appear like it. But it will be an appearance,
A shape left behind, with like wings spreading out,
Brightly empowered with like colors, swarmingly,
But not quite molten, not quite the fluid thing,
A little changed by tips of artifice, changed
By the glints of sound from the grass. These are not
The early constellations, from which came the first
Illustrious intimations -- uncertain love,
The knowledge of being, sense without sense of time.
Take the diamonds from your hair and lay them down.
The deer-grass is thin. The timothy is brown.
The shadow of an external world comes near.
WallaceStevens
"Perception and Painting in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought"
Carolyne Quinn
Paris III, Université de Sorbonne-Nouvelle/University College Dublin
Abstract: Maintaining that “the perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence” (1964/1964: 13), Maurice Merleau-Ponty sought to develop a descriptive philosophy of perception, our kinaesthetic, prescientific, lived-bodily experience and cognition of the world—the unification of our affective, motor and sensory capacities. For Merleau-Ponty, ‘perception’ is an expressive and creative instance intimately linked with artistic practice, and although he wrote about all kinds of art, painting was the art form he considered in most depth. This paper seeks to elaborate upon the links between perception and painting in his thought, examining his three main essays on the topic of painting. We begin with the descriptive phenomenology of “Cézanne’s Doubt” under the influence of Edmund Husserl (1945), to structuralism in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), and finally to his formulation of an original ontology in “eye and Mind” (1961).
Keywords: Perception; painting; Merleau-Ponty; art; phenomenology
In the lexicon of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘perception’ has an idiosyncratic meaning and drawing attention to and describing the role of this notion in human experience may be said to be one of the main aims and contributions of his phenomenology to philosophy today. Arguing perception to be an expressive and creative instance, Merleau-Ponty also maintains that it is intimately linked with artistic practice. For example, in a 1952 essay entitled “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” he wrote that “it is the expressive operation begun in the least perception, which amplifies into painting and art” (Merleau-Ponty 1951/1993: 106-7).1 In other words, while perception is the origin of both the act of making art and its end-product, ‘amplification’ denotes the specific, important changes that occur in the ‘translation’ and ‘extension’ of perception into the physical process of art-making.
It is the aim of this article to explore the relationship between perception and art in Merleau-Ponty’s thought with reference to the practice of painting. Though the philosopher wrote about music, visual art, film, poetry and literature, the subject of painting constituted the majority of Merleau-Ponty’s writings on art at all stages of his philosophical career, believing as he did that particular instances of painting and phenomenological description were intrinsically intertwined.2 This essay will explore his three essays that consider painting and painters, which provide a guide to the development of his philosophy: from the descriptive phenomenology of “Cézanne’s Doubt” under the influence of Husserl (1945), to structuralism in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), and finally to his formulation of an original ontology in “Eye and Mind” (1961). . . ."
http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/perspectives/resources/Carolyne_Quinn.pdf
Carolyne Quinn
Paris III, Université de Sorbonne-Nouvelle/University College Dublin
Abstract: Maintaining that “the perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence” (1964/1964: 13), Maurice Merleau-Ponty sought to develop a descriptive philosophy of perception, our kinaesthetic, prescientific, lived-bodily experience and cognition of the world—the unification of our affective, motor and sensory capacities. For Merleau-Ponty, ‘perception’ is an expressive and creative instance intimately linked with artistic practice, and although he wrote about all kinds of art, painting was the art form he considered in most depth. This paper seeks to elaborate upon the links between perception and painting in his thought, examining his three main essays on the topic of painting. We begin with the descriptive phenomenology of “Cézanne’s Doubt” under the influence of Edmund Husserl (1945), to structuralism in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), and finally to his formulation of an original ontology in “eye and Mind” (1961).
Keywords: Perception; painting; Merleau-Ponty; art; phenomenology
In the lexicon of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘perception’ has an idiosyncratic meaning and drawing attention to and describing the role of this notion in human experience may be said to be one of the main aims and contributions of his phenomenology to philosophy today. Arguing perception to be an expressive and creative instance, Merleau-Ponty also maintains that it is intimately linked with artistic practice. For example, in a 1952 essay entitled “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” he wrote that “it is the expressive operation begun in the least perception, which amplifies into painting and art” (Merleau-Ponty 1951/1993: 106-7).1 In other words, while perception is the origin of both the act of making art and its end-product, ‘amplification’ denotes the specific, important changes that occur in the ‘translation’ and ‘extension’ of perception into the physical process of art-making.
It is the aim of this article to explore the relationship between perception and art in Merleau-Ponty’s thought with reference to the practice of painting. Though the philosopher wrote about music, visual art, film, poetry and literature, the subject of painting constituted the majority of Merleau-Ponty’s writings on art at all stages of his philosophical career, believing as he did that particular instances of painting and phenomenological description were intrinsically intertwined.2 This essay will explore his three essays that consider painting and painters, which provide a guide to the development of his philosophy: from the descriptive phenomenology of “Cézanne’s Doubt” under the influence of Husserl (1945), to structuralism in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), and finally to his formulation of an original ontology in “Eye and Mind” (1961). . . ."
http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/perspectives/resources/Carolyne_Quinn.pdf
‘There is no brute world, only an elaborated world’:
Merleau-Ponty on the intersubjective constitution of the world1
By Dermot Moran
University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland Dermot.moran@ucd.ie
South African Journal of Philosophy 2013, 32(4): xx–xx ISSN 0258-0136 EISSN 2073-4867 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02580136.2013.867396
In his later works, Merleau-Ponty proposes the notion of ‘the flesh’ (la chair ) as a new ‘element’, as he put it, in his ontological monism designed to overcome the legacy of Cartesian dualism with its bifurcation of all things into matter or spirit. Most Merleau-Ponty commentators recognise that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ is inspired by Edmund Husserl’s conceptions of ‘lived body’ (Leib) and ‘vivacity’ or ‘liveliness’ (Leiblichkeit). But it is not always recognised that, for Merleau-Ponty, the constitution of the world of perception, the problem of embodiment or incarnation, is at the very same time one with the problem of the experience of others in what Husserl called Einfühlung or Fremderfahung and indeed one with the problem of the constitution of the commonly shared world ‘for all’. As MerleauPonty put it in his late essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs, ‘the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being, or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there’. In other words, the problem of the apprehension of the other is part of the overall apprehension of the transcendent world. In this paper I want to meditate on the relations between embodiment, experience of others, and experience of the world in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. I will take particular note, as in the title of this presentation, on the claim made by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible that ‘there is no brute world, only elaborated world’ (il n’y a pas de monde brut, il n’y a qu’un monde élaboré).
In this paper I shall explicate the relations between embodiment, experience of others, and experience of the world in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. I shall explore the enigmatic claim made by Merleau-Ponty in his The Visible and the Invisible that ‘there is no brute world, there is only an elaborated world’ (il n’y a pas de monde brut, il n’y a qu’un monde élaboré).2 I shall primarily focus on Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished manuscript The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously with a selection of Working Notes in 1964, edited by his long-term friend Claude Lefort (1924– 2010), but I shall also argue that much that Merleau-Ponty says there is already foreshadowed and predelineated in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945)3. There is not, contrary to appearances, a radical shift between the earlier and the later Merleau-Ponty, although the later Merleau-Ponty made a more sustained effort to develop a new vocabulary to express his developing ontological insights. Merleau-Ponty—partly through the influence of his friend Eugen Fink as well as through his reading of the later Heidegger—came more and more to appreciate the importance of the very problem of ‘world’. Thus already in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty interprets the phenomenological reduction as working to slacken ‘the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical’ (PP: p. xiii; viii). This fascination with the transcendence of the world and its peculiar mode of being is carried through into the later work. Thus all of the extant outlines for The Visible and the Invisible begin with the subtitle ‘Being and World’ (Être et Monde, see VI: p. xxxv; 10–11).
The monism of flesh
In The Visible and the Invisible and other related later writings, Maurice Merleau-Ponty introduced the notion of ‘the flesh’ (la chair) as the new ‘element’ in the ontological monism he proposes to overcome the Cartesian dualism, with its bifurcation of all things into matter or spirit, a dualism he felt still informed his Phenomenology of Perception. Of course, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ owes a great debt to Edmund Husserl’s conception of the ‘lived body’ (Leib) and ‘vivacity’ or ‘liveliness’ (Leiblichkeit), as elaborated especially in Ideas II4 and the Crisis of the European Sciences,5 and there must also be, although he does not explicitly acknowledge it, the more subterranean influence of Sartre’s discussion of the body in Being and Nothingness, which Merleau-Ponty explicitly invokes in terms of Sartre’s analysis of the caress (PP: p. 186; 216).6 While the connection between Husserl’s Leib and Merleau-Ponty’s is readily acknowledged by commentators,7 the larger interconnection between embodiment, empathy, alterity and world constitution is not generally recognised and has not been fully explored by commentators.8
In this paper, therefore, I shall show that for Merleau-Ponty the problem of embodiment (also called ‘incorporation’ or ‘incarnation) and indeed the problem of the constitution of the world of perception have to be understood as one with the problem of the experience of others in what Husserl called ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung), ‘experience of the foreign’ (Fremderfahung), or, more generally, ‘intersubjectivity’ (Intersubjektivität). Furthermore, the problem of empathy is deeply implicated in the larger problem of the constitution of the commonly experienced shared world ‘for all’, a concept that is actually quite elusive within Husserlian phenomenology and its aftermath. As Merleau-Ponty will put it in his late essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs (1960),9 ‘the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being, or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there’ (Le problème de l’Einfühlung comme celui de mon incarnation débouche donc sur la méditation du sensible, ou, si l’on préfère, il s’y transporte) (Signes: p. 171; 215). In other words, the apprehension of the other is an integral element in the overall constitution of the transcendent sensible world. Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty claims that the ‘I-other’ problem is the same as the ‘I-world’ problem. Indeed, already in Phenomenology of Perception, he claims that ‘t is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive “things”’ (PP: p. 186; 216). For Merleau-Ponty, as we shall see, the profusion of perspectives produced by plural embodied subjects actually belongs to the very being of the world. The world simply has intrinsic plurality built into it, or ‘interwoven’ into it, and therefore the whole notion of ‘world’ has to be understood in a radically new way. Furthermore, the world appears as one complete entity, a purely objective something, only from the point of view of the ‘view from nowhere’ (la vue de nulle part) or ‘the oversight thinking’ (pensée de survol), which has been developed by humans in their efforts to gain an objective stance.
Overcoming dualism
. . . .
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.889.2318&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Merleau-Ponty on the intersubjective constitution of the world1
By Dermot Moran
University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland Dermot.moran@ucd.ie
South African Journal of Philosophy 2013, 32(4): xx–xx ISSN 0258-0136 EISSN 2073-4867 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02580136.2013.867396
In his later works, Merleau-Ponty proposes the notion of ‘the flesh’ (la chair ) as a new ‘element’, as he put it, in his ontological monism designed to overcome the legacy of Cartesian dualism with its bifurcation of all things into matter or spirit. Most Merleau-Ponty commentators recognise that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ is inspired by Edmund Husserl’s conceptions of ‘lived body’ (Leib) and ‘vivacity’ or ‘liveliness’ (Leiblichkeit). But it is not always recognised that, for Merleau-Ponty, the constitution of the world of perception, the problem of embodiment or incarnation, is at the very same time one with the problem of the experience of others in what Husserl called Einfühlung or Fremderfahung and indeed one with the problem of the constitution of the commonly shared world ‘for all’. As MerleauPonty put it in his late essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs, ‘the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being, or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there’. In other words, the problem of the apprehension of the other is part of the overall apprehension of the transcendent world. In this paper I want to meditate on the relations between embodiment, experience of others, and experience of the world in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. I will take particular note, as in the title of this presentation, on the claim made by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible that ‘there is no brute world, only elaborated world’ (il n’y a pas de monde brut, il n’y a qu’un monde élaboré).
In this paper I shall explicate the relations between embodiment, experience of others, and experience of the world in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. I shall explore the enigmatic claim made by Merleau-Ponty in his The Visible and the Invisible that ‘there is no brute world, there is only an elaborated world’ (il n’y a pas de monde brut, il n’y a qu’un monde élaboré).2 I shall primarily focus on Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished manuscript The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously with a selection of Working Notes in 1964, edited by his long-term friend Claude Lefort (1924– 2010), but I shall also argue that much that Merleau-Ponty says there is already foreshadowed and predelineated in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945)3. There is not, contrary to appearances, a radical shift between the earlier and the later Merleau-Ponty, although the later Merleau-Ponty made a more sustained effort to develop a new vocabulary to express his developing ontological insights. Merleau-Ponty—partly through the influence of his friend Eugen Fink as well as through his reading of the later Heidegger—came more and more to appreciate the importance of the very problem of ‘world’. Thus already in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty interprets the phenomenological reduction as working to slacken ‘the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical’ (PP: p. xiii; viii). This fascination with the transcendence of the world and its peculiar mode of being is carried through into the later work. Thus all of the extant outlines for The Visible and the Invisible begin with the subtitle ‘Being and World’ (Être et Monde, see VI: p. xxxv; 10–11).
The monism of flesh
In The Visible and the Invisible and other related later writings, Maurice Merleau-Ponty introduced the notion of ‘the flesh’ (la chair) as the new ‘element’ in the ontological monism he proposes to overcome the Cartesian dualism, with its bifurcation of all things into matter or spirit, a dualism he felt still informed his Phenomenology of Perception. Of course, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ owes a great debt to Edmund Husserl’s conception of the ‘lived body’ (Leib) and ‘vivacity’ or ‘liveliness’ (Leiblichkeit), as elaborated especially in Ideas II4 and the Crisis of the European Sciences,5 and there must also be, although he does not explicitly acknowledge it, the more subterranean influence of Sartre’s discussion of the body in Being and Nothingness, which Merleau-Ponty explicitly invokes in terms of Sartre’s analysis of the caress (PP: p. 186; 216).6 While the connection between Husserl’s Leib and Merleau-Ponty’s is readily acknowledged by commentators,7 the larger interconnection between embodiment, empathy, alterity and world constitution is not generally recognised and has not been fully explored by commentators.8
In this paper, therefore, I shall show that for Merleau-Ponty the problem of embodiment (also called ‘incorporation’ or ‘incarnation) and indeed the problem of the constitution of the world of perception have to be understood as one with the problem of the experience of others in what Husserl called ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung), ‘experience of the foreign’ (Fremderfahung), or, more generally, ‘intersubjectivity’ (Intersubjektivität). Furthermore, the problem of empathy is deeply implicated in the larger problem of the constitution of the commonly experienced shared world ‘for all’, a concept that is actually quite elusive within Husserlian phenomenology and its aftermath. As Merleau-Ponty will put it in his late essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs (1960),9 ‘the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being, or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there’ (Le problème de l’Einfühlung comme celui de mon incarnation débouche donc sur la méditation du sensible, ou, si l’on préfère, il s’y transporte) (Signes: p. 171; 215). In other words, the apprehension of the other is an integral element in the overall constitution of the transcendent sensible world. Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty claims that the ‘I-other’ problem is the same as the ‘I-world’ problem. Indeed, already in Phenomenology of Perception, he claims that ‘t is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive “things”’ (PP: p. 186; 216). For Merleau-Ponty, as we shall see, the profusion of perspectives produced by plural embodied subjects actually belongs to the very being of the world. The world simply has intrinsic plurality built into it, or ‘interwoven’ into it, and therefore the whole notion of ‘world’ has to be understood in a radically new way. Furthermore, the world appears as one complete entity, a purely objective something, only from the point of view of the ‘view from nowhere’ (la vue de nulle part) or ‘the oversight thinking’ (pensée de survol), which has been developed by humans in their efforts to gain an objective stance.
Overcoming dualism
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http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.889.2318&rep=rep1&type=pdf
smcder
Paranormal Adept
smcder
Paranormal Adept
What does such an explanation look like? What sort of demonstrations would be required to show that mind and matter are composed of an underlying substrate?
What Russell says, as I understand it, is that the only intrinsic nature of matter we can know is when we have conscious experiences - you see all the obvious questions that brings up! But it also doesn't show how there is a hope of bridging that in the sense of having the kind of knowledge of the intrinsic that we have of the extrinsic - that this is not the right way to think about it, this is why I said:
Perception experienced is perception understood objectively.
And why it seems you fell into a particular kind of trap when you replied:
But can you explain how?
But, in case you didn't fall into a trap - I can respond by asking what kind of explanation are you looking for?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
It's interesting that while we can't subjectively prove there is an "external" objective world, we can't objectively prove there is an "internal" subjective world.
You're right that we can't craft an objective, scientific explanation of the MBP. So an explanation, in that sense, will continue to elude us.
My quest has been to 'explain' the MBP in logical, metaphysical terms for myself, not to find a scientific explanation per se. For me, right now, real materialism/non-materialist physicalism provides this explanation.
My question to you re 'can you explain' was in a similar vein; my question was whether a monist/dualist agnostic could make the claim "Perception experienced is perception understood objectively."
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I don't see right off why not ... like WAIMANSE this invites word play and a questioning of where language is involved in the problem - are the paradoxes real or only due to a lack of granularity in our language/concepts or is the language we've been using just misleading?
When we have a conception - do the images and what the language generates for us fool us sometimes? psycho-physical nexus works that way for me - it creates some kind of solid image that I think is misleading ... and "bridging mind and body" ... but where do we locate the bridge? Looking for a time and place that the objective becomes subjective and vice-versa puts the dialog on the "stuffy" side - we can say "where" when we talk about mental things ... the "where" in where does this become a problem for you? doesn't refer to a place in your head or anywhere else ... of course you can it is in your head and you can give that a time ... but ...
and this is regardless of whether mind is a substance apart from matter or is matter or if there is only mind, I think this is true - maybe that invites a whole new vocabulary for subjective experience, maybe we limit our experience by our language - but if that's true, how would we convey that? There is precedent in the meditative traditions and in phenomenology, I think in the epoche' ... in bracketing ...
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Think of Persinger's "God helmet" ... some people feel something, some don't (Dawkins claimed not to) and the machine clearly has physical effects, that's the point - what kind of machinery or experiment would by pass that problem? Let's say I create a machine and point it at your head and no instrument on earth detects any physical changes in your brain or the surrounding area ... we still are putting energy into the machine, so there is physical change there and other, undetected physical changes can't be ruled out ... (and why did I point it at your head anyway?? ;-) Something occurring at a distance in time and space would be helpful but the trend is to explain those (if you feel the phenomena is real) in terms of QM or other physical principles - I don't know, entanglement ... so what would definitive proof of mind as fundamental or even neutral monism, an underlying stuff ... look like? How would we go about measuring something that has both mental and physical characteristics?
You mean that, because we are unable to intellectually reduce the world and ourselves to concepts, we learn nothing from what we experience in being-here as embodied and also conscious, always moving toward what we find in the world in our undeniable need and desire?
And that we must instead rely for understanding on "logical, metaphysical terms" of our own invention, within the limited logic we have developed in our limited existences and brief history?
What are the "logical, metaphysical terms" that form the ground of your speculations?
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