Here is a page of notes concerning the temporality of perception and consciousness as embedded in nature that I took down at some point in the past. I post it because it includes a number of links to papers [some of which I've linked here earlier, some new to our discussion] and also some extracts from papers we have not yet read. I think that
@Soupie will find the references to Whitehead's thought taken up by Merleau-Ponty {identified in the long extract from the brilliant Ted Toadvine near the end of my notes} to be potentially very interesting and relevant to his search for a valid ontology. This extensive extract from Toadvine also recognizes the influence of Claudel on MP's developing philosophy and will be helpful for all of us, I think, as we attempt to understand the nature of phenomenal experience, perception, and consciousness as events expressive of the temporality and evolution of nature in itself.
Notes:
DAVID MORRIS, CONCORDIA, PAPERS, AND RENAUD BARBARAS
From the Nature of Meaning to a
Phenomenological Refiguring of Nature
http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977292/1/nature_of_meaning_published.pdf
note 1, pg 318: “. . . Note, however, that from a phenomenological perspective a lot is already presumed and embedded in this division between the easy and the hard problem. For example, it can be argued that this way of dividing the problem already presupposes and reduplicates the sort of dualism that it
seeks to undo, leading to various conceptual, methodological, and explanatory questions or problems. In part what is at stake in this paper is showing how living phenomena (which are surely integral to the evolved mind!) challenge such a division between easy problems (about how natural systems work) and hard problems (about understanding natural systems as having experiential or meaningful aspects). This is in aid of having this challenge reorient our research and inquiry.”
Note 3 “See, e.g. Renaud Barbaras, ‘The Movement of the Living as the Originary Foundation of Perceptual Intentionality’, in J. Petitot, F.J. Varela, B. Pachoud and J.-M. Roy (eds.) Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, J. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
AND SEE BARBARAS,
THE BEING OF THE PHENOMENON
Finish reading this:
Phenomenology, Naturalism and the Sense of Reality
Matthew Ratcliffe https://philosophyofdepression.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/phenomenologynaturalismreality.pdf
SEE THIS REVIEW BY EVAN THOMPSON OF Havi Carel and Darian Meacham, Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature
Published: July 09, 2014
Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame
CONT from MORRIS, ABOVE, PP. 321-22: “. . . the approach taken here and in the self-organization literature somewhat converges with the panpsychism that Galen Strawson pursues[9], in that it takes meaningfulness seriously as an irreducible phenomenon pervasively manifest in nature, yet it diverges in conceptualizing meaning as arising in those dynamics themselves, rather than being an irreducibly independent phenomenon.”
Note 9: See, Galen Strawson, ‘Real Naturalism’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (Forthcoming). AVAILABLE ONLINE.
OTHER MORRIS PAPERS: ACADEMIA EDU/CONCORDIA:
David Morris | Concordia University (Canada) - Academia.edu
Bringing Phenomenology Down to Earth: Passivity, Development, and Merleau-Ponty’s Transformation of Philosophy
David Morris, Department of Philosophy, Concordia University,
David.Morris@concordia.ca
Submitted version. Forthcoming in
Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought 16.
Abstract: I suggest how Merleau-Pontian sense hinges on an ontology in which passivity and what I call “development” are fundamental. This means, though, that the possibility of philosophy cannot be guaranteed in advance: philosophy is a joint operation of philosophers and being, and is radically contingent on a pre-philosophical field. Merleau-Ponty thus transforms philosophy, revealing a philosophy of tomorrow: a new way of doing philosophy that, because it is grounded in pre-reflective contingency, has to
wait to describe its beginnings, and so has to keep studying its beginnings tomorrow. This does not destroy Husserl’s project of a transcendental philosophy, it just accepts that the transcendental conditions of philosophy cannot be constituted or even revealed via wholly active or autonomous reflection. Merleau-Ponty thus brings phenomenology down to earth by expanding it into a phenomenology of life and earth that describes the concrete beginnings of phenomena and phenomenology.
“The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This sort of thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only seeks to bring them down to earth” — Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences”1
“We cannot have truth without risks. If we begin our search for truth with an eye for conclusions, there is no more philosophy. The philosopher does not seek shortcuts; he goes all the way.” — “Bergson in the Making”2
"From the
Structure of Behaviour onward,
sense—meaning as engendered within being, and one of Merleau-Ponty’s greatest discoveries[3]—is key to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, sense is the transcendental condition of philosophy. In this paper I suggest how sense hinges on an ontology in which passivity and what I call “development” are fundamental. This means, though, that the possibility of philosophy cannot be guaranteed in advance: philosophy is a joint operation of philosophers and being, and is radically contingent on a pre-philosophical field that enables philosophy in the first place. Merleau-Ponty thus transforms philosophy, revealing a philosophy of tomorrow: a new way of doing philosophy that, because it is grounded in pre-reflective contingency, has to
wait to describe its beginnings, and so has to keep studying its beginnings tomorrow. This does not destroy Husserl’s project of a transcendental philosophy grounded in unsurpassable conditions that are autonomous from and irreducible to the terms of any discipline prior to philosophy (e.g., the natural sciences). It just accepts that these conditions cannot be constituted or even revealed via wholly active or autonomous reflection. Merleau-Ponty thus brings phenomenology down to earth: phenomenology must expand into a phenomenology of life and earth that describes the concrete beginnings of phenomena and phenomenology.
I first contextualize my overall point by showing how it springs from Merleau-Ponty’s continual reflection on philosophical beginnings. I then study sense, to show how the phenomenon of sense entails my points about ontology, passivity and development. Finally I suggest how this transforms philosophy. My aim is programmatic: there is not enough room for an exhaustive textual exposition, so, for this issue on “Merleau-Ponty Tomorrow,” I synthesize themes of his philosophy to offer something new.
1) The Radical Contingency of Philosophical Beginnings
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, as with other enduring philosophical work, is notable not just for its results, but for its continual engagement with the question of what philosophy is in the first place. This question is explicit in many of Merleau-Ponty’s works, from his
Éloge de la philosophie, to “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” to
Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. But the question also fundamentally informs his major works,
The Structure of Behaviour (SB, 1942),
Phenomenology of Perception (PhP, 1945), and
The Visible and the Invisible (VI, 1964), which first of all seek to grasp how we, as reflecting philosophers, relate to the things that we perceive, cognize and conceptualize. For Merleau-Ponty this entails re-envisioning philosophy itself as beginning from within its concrete place amidst things, versus leaping to or springing from a beginning in a ready made “view from above.” Hence his ongoing quest for radically empirical methods that embed philosophical beginnings in being itself:
Structure’s critique of behaviour;
Phenomenology’s radical reflection; hyper-reflection in
The Visible and the Invisible.
This radically empirical commitment to finding both questions and answers beginning within being—to the primacy of perception and “perceptual faith”—entails
sense. If there were no meaning, if nothing mattered, then there would be no philosophy, there would be nothing definite to ask questions about—there would not even be the possibility of Cartesian doubt. But if this meaning did not arise within being itself, then our questions and answers could be split from being—there might
only be Cartesian doubt. (For Merleau-Ponty, such a self-contained doubt, which would confront being from the outside, is absurd and self-contradictory: since it admits no outside standard, it has no real thing to doubt and admits no real answer.) This tension between “not even doubt” and “only doubt,” between being not mattering, and doubt not really mattering, is perhaps the ultimate matrix of all of Merleau-Ponty’s other dialectical moves (between empiricism and intellectualism, passivity and activity, and so on).
The transcendental condition of philosophy, then, is
sense: being itself mattering in determinate ways that can both motivate and answer our philosophical questions. For philosophy, then, being has to matter—but if being only mattered according to what we already think about it, it would not matter in a way that enabled real doubt and its real resolution.
Philosophy is radically contingent on being and nature (visible being) already mattering their own way. This radical contingency is the ultimate topic and topos of philosophy. If we follow Merleau-Ponty all the way to the beginnings of philosophy, we find there is no shortcut even to that beginning. (Descartes’s fundamental error is seeking such a shortcut.) Each effort of beginning philosophy reveals philosophy as responsible to and risking a kind of irreducible contingency. This is why phenomenology must
expand into a phenomenology of life, earth and a phenomenology of phenomenology, an
empirical study of how phenomenology comes to be. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “Precisely in order to accomplish its will for radicalism, [philosophy] would have to take as its theme the umbilical bond that binds it always to Being, the inalienable horizon with which it is already and henceforth circumvented, the primary initiation which it tries in vain to go back on.” (
VI 144) Grasping why this so requires further study of sense as the transcendental condition of philosophy, starting with a brief review and illustration of sense.
2) Sense as Meaning Immanent in Being . . .
http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/980254/1/Bringing Phenomenology Down to Earth for Chiasmi Submission for spectrum.pdf
RENAUD BARBARAS:
THE BEING OF THE PHENOMENON
DESIRE AND DISTANCE
LIFE, MOVEMENT, AND DESIRE {Cf Stevens, “Desire and the Object”
Research in Phenomenology 38 (1):3-17 (2008)
Abstract
In French, the verb "to live" designates both being alive and the experience of something. This ambiguity has a philosophical meaning. The task of a phenomenology of life is to describe an originary sense of living from which the very distinction between life in the intransitive sense and life in the transitive, or intentional, sense proceeds. Hans Jonas is one of those rare authors who has tried to give an account of the specificity of life instead of reducing life to categories that are foreign to it. However, the concept of metabolism, by which Jonas characterizes vital activity, attests to a presupposition as to life: life is conceived as self-preservation, that is, as negation of death, in such a way that life is, in the end, not thought on the basis of itself. The aim of this article is to show that life as such must be understood as movement in a radicalized sense, in which the living being is no more the subject than the product. All living beings are in effect characterized by a movement, which nothing can cause to cease, a movement that largely exceeds what is required by the satisfaction of needs and that, because of this, bears witness to an essential incompleteness. This incompleteness reveals that life is originarily bound to a world. Because the world to which the living being relates is essentially non-totalizable and unpresentable, living movement can not essentially complete itself. Thus, in the final analysis, life must be defined as desire, and in virtue of this view, life does not tend toward self-preservation, as we have almost always thought, but toward the manifestation of the world.
Renaud Barbaras, Life, movement, and desire - PhilPapers
OBTAIN FROM STROZIER: Author:
Renaud Barbaras, Life, Movement, and Desire
· Source:
Research in Phenomenology,
Volume 38, Issue 1, pages 3 – 17
Publication Year : 2008
DOI:
10.1163/156916408X258924
ISSN: 0085-5553 E-ISSN: 1569-1640
TED TOADVINE: Natural Time and Immemorial Nature (2009), at
Natural Time and Immemorial Nature (2009)
“. . . There is, however, another, richer manner of understanding the “at the first day” of nature already in Phenomenology of Perception.
This interpretation discovers a genuine creative newness within each moment of perception, and links this newness with the accumulation of perceptual memory. {In WS, NSF, “Begin. Ephebe . . . You must become an ignorant man again, and see the Sun with an ignorant eye.”} For instance, Merleau-Ponty writes that, when I contemplate an object with the sole intention of watching it exist and unfold its riches before my eyes, then it ceases to be an allusion to a general type, and I become aware that each perception, and not merely that of sights which I am discovering for the first time, reenacts on its own account the birth of intelligence and has some element of creative genius about it: in order that I may recognize the tree as a tree, it is necessary that, beneath this familiar meaning, the momentary arrangement of the visible scene should begin all over again, as on the very first day of the vegetable kingdom, to outline the in-dividual idea of this tree. (PP 54/50–51; my emphasis)
We find, then, a creativity that can only be termed “natural” at the core of each perception. Furthermore, this creative event is linked by Merleau-Ponty with the immemorial time of my own personal history, as when he writes that “my first perception, along with the horizons which surrounded it, is an ever-present event, an unforgettable tradition; even as a thinking subject, I still am that first perception, the continuation of that same life inaugurated by it” (PP 466/473). This account of the creativity of natural time conflicts with its presentation as empty repetition. What must be understood is precisely the sense in which the passage of nature may yet entail its creative renewal, so that its being always “at the first day”does not deny its establishment of a genuine history. This would seem to be what Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he interprets this phrase in a late working note: “It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world (and not in the past) an‘ever new’ and ‘always the same.’ . . . The sensible, Nature, transcends the past present distinction, realizes from within passage from one into the other” (VI320–21/267). Our question, then, is how this passage between past and present is to be conceived according to a richer conception of natural time. Two sources are indispensable for understanding the broadening of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of time. The first of these is Paul Claudel’s
Poetic Art , which Merleau-Ponty cites repeatedly in the manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible (VI 140/103, 161/121,233/179). It will be remembered that
Poetic Art also provides an epigraph for the Temporality chapter of
Phenomenology: “Time is the sense of life (sense as in the direction [sens] of a stream, the sense of a sentence, the sense of smell)”(PP469/476).
Here time lies at the intersection of direction, meaning, and sensibility. But whereas Merleau-Ponty’s chapter on temporality emphasizes the fundamental equivalence of time and subjectivity, for Claudel time discloses the creative differentiation of the universe as a whole. This is, in fact, the meaning of his title, a reference to his call for a “new Art of Poetry of theUniverse,” in the sense of
poiein, which would be the “autochthonous art used by all that which is born” and which is “practiced before our eyes by nature itself” (AP 50–51/31–32). This poetry of nature is the metaphor, harmony, or proportion by which each thing calls for precisely the completion that it finds in the rest of the universe. As Claudel writes,
“Nothing is complete in itself and each can only be completed by that which it lacks. But that which each particular thing lacks is infinite; we cannot know in advance the complement it calls for. Only through the secret taste of our spirit, do we realize when effective harmony is achieved, that is, the essential and generating fundamental difference." (AP 22/12)
This “essential and generating fundamental difference” may call forth “effective harmonies” among the natural objects that we encounter, as Claudel describes the “green of a maple tree” answering the “appeal of a pine,”or as he insists that “the plantation of this bouquet of pines, the shape of this mountain are no more due to chance than the Parthenon or this diamond” (AP 50–51/31–32). More pertinently, what makes nature always appear as “at the first day”is the generative difference of the past. As Claudel explains,
‘The past is an incantation of things to come, the generating difference they need, the forever growing sum of future conditions. It determines the sense, and, in this light, it does not cease existing any more than the first words of a sentence when the eye reaches the last ones. Better still, it does not stop developing, organizing within itself, like a building, whose role and aspect is changed by new constructions, or like a sentence made clearer by another sentence. In a word, what has been once, never loses its operating virtue; it increases with each moment’s contribution. The present minute is different from all other minutes, in that it does not border on the same quantity of past....At every breath,the world remains as new as it was at the first gulp of air out of which the first man made his first expiration.' (AP 44–45/27)
The world is, at every moment, entirely new, not because it eternally repeats an unchanging beginning, but because the passage of becoming guarantees the uniqueness of each combination of generating differences. This becoming is the poiesis of a nature for which “to be is to create,” such that the whole universe, for Claudel, is “nothing but a time-marking machine” of which human clocks are “unwitting copies” (AP 43/27, 34/20). These passages from Claudel are significant in two respects: First, they demonstrate the “passage between past and present” that joins the “ever new” with the “always the same,” as Merleau-Ponty seeks in his working notes. In other words,they demonstrate a positive and creative sense for nature being always “at the first day.” Second, they do so not by tracing time to the subject, but rather by recognizing a fundamental resonance between the natural time within and without:
“What time is it within and outside me, according to my closing or opening myself? I hear my heart within me, and the clock in the very middle of the house. I am. I feel, I listen, within myself, to the beating of this machine, confined between my bones, a machine through which I continue to be” (AP 46/28). The marking-time of the heart resonates with the marking-time of the universe, such that time is neither reducible to my subjectivity nor independent of it, situating me within an infinite fabric of differences by which my being is generated. I emerge as part of the same wave of the past as all other things that I encounter, so that “there is no cause but a total one” and “each effect is the varying evaluation of the whole moment” (AP 55–56/35
). {note parallel in Kant’s thought in the Anthropology; also compare WS, "The Pure Good of Theory," The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," etc.} The entire passage of the universe continues to exert its efficacy with each following moment, such that the present is never a point but a growing fabric that is at each instant wholly different and wholly demanded as the complement to the entirety of what has preceded it. In this case, there is no truly cyclical time of the body any more than of nature writ large, save through the isolating effects of our understanding. It is from Whitehead that Merleau-Ponty draws the completion of this line of thinking,which is to recognize a “passage of nature”that is neither an empty repetition nor simply correlated with the embodied subject. Merleau-Ponty’s survey of historical conceptions of nature in his 1956–57 course reaches its completion with Whitehead, and while the latter’s work receives no direct discussion in the text or notes of The Visible and the Invisible, we do have another clue to Whitehead’s significance. Sartre recounts a conversation from 1959 in which Merleau-Ponty suggested that he may write about Nature. “And then, to lead me on,” Sartre writes, “he added, ‘I read a sentence in Whitehead which struck me: “Nature is in tatters.”’11 Sartre admits his puzzlement about the meaning of this phrase, which undoubtedly refers to Whitehead’s remark, in The Concept of Nature, that “nature as perceived always has a ragged edge.”12 As Merleau-Ponty recognizes, this phrase expresses Whitehead’s rejection of punctual spatiotemporal existences (N 153–54/113). In NATURAL TIME AND IMMEMORIAL NATURE . . . . . [cont. at pg. 219]
{cf WS, DESIRE AND THE OBJECT"
Cf. this search with Toadvine’s reading:
Search - CenturyLink
AND Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction online here:
Wallace Stevens – Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction | Genius
“III
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early
candor to its late plural
And
the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,
An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.”
NSF, VIII
“…But the MacCullough is MacCullough.
It does not follow that major man is man.
If MacCullough himself lay lounging by the sea,
Drowned in its washes, reading in the sound,
About the thinker of the first idea,
He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,
Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,
Or a leaner being, moving in on him,
Of greater aptitude and apprehension,
As if the waves at last were never broken,
As if the language suddenly, with ease,
Said things it had laboriously spoken.
Find: “And not to have is the beginning of
desire. To have what is not ....
by the studious eye,
Swaddled in revery, the
object
of ..."
Continuing Toadvine ...
“. . . On Merleau-Ponty’s reading, Whitehead’s critique of unique emplacement makes salient the ontological value of perception:
“What I perceive is both for me and in the things. Perception is made starting from the interior of Nature” (N 159/117). In other words, the perceiving body is itself one event within the overlapping series of events that constitutes space-time, and the mind equally participates in this “passage of nature.” Consequently, Whitehead’s descriptions suggest a reversal of the role played by nature and subjectivity in the unfurling of time. Ironically, it is with reference to Sartre that Merleau-Ponty makes this contrast explicit when he writes that, with Sartre, "Being is without exigency, without activities,without potentialities. Sartre, like the whole of the philosophical tradition from Saint Augustine to Bergson, defines matter by instantaneity, the instantaneous present, and conceives memory and the past only by mind; in the things there is only the present, and correlatively, the“presence”of the past or of the future requires mind or the For-itself." (N 161/ 118–19)
By contrast, for Whitehead, nature need not be leavened with subjectivity to effect its own spatiotemporal unfurling. While measured or serial time is relative and subjective, “there is a time inherent to Nature”: This time, in Whitehead, is inherent in the things,it embraces us, to the extent that we participate in the things, or that we take part in the process of Nature.It is essential for us, but in so-far as we are Nature. Subjectivity is caught up in the system of a cosmic time, in a subjectivity of Nature. (N 161/119)
{Cf WS, "Walking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly"}
Rather than nature requiring subjectivity for its passage, the passage of subjectivity is an event of nature. Followed through to its conclusion, this suggests a further complication of the structure of radical reflection. We have shown above that
reflection incorporates the natural time of the body as its own immemorial past, and that a radical reflection—what Merleau-Ponty will, in The Visible and the Invisible, refer to as hyper-reflection [surréflexion](VI61/ 38, 70/46)—aims to take this liability to the unreflective into account. In the wake of Claudel and Whitehead, this structure of radical reflection requires two revisions: First, the immemorial moment that it enfolds cannot be a cyclical time of empty repetition. In so far as the body is an event within ragged-edged nature, it cannot be isolated from this nature’s generative unfurling. Even the time of the anonymous body, such as the rhythmic beating of the heart, must be understood as a poetic event called to respond to the generative differences laid out by the entire history of nature. The creative passage of nature therefore provides the best interpretation of how it is that nature is always “at the first day.” On this understanding of Herr’s phrase, the perennial novelty of nature is related to its Latin etymology:
nascor, “to be born” (N 19/3). And, as Claudel notes, “We are not born alone.
To be born [naître], for everything, is to be born together [co-naître]. Every birth is a knowledge[ connaissance]” (AP 62/40). Natural time is the continual co-birth of all in generative difference. This points toward the second revision of radical reflection, which is the synchrony of the immemorial time at the heart of reflection with the spatiotemporal unfurling of the per-ceived world. The pyramid of time on which every reflective moment balances is the entire memory of the world, its pure past. Consequently, reflection must also be understood as an event of nature that eventuates its passage. Yet we have associated immemorial time with both birth and death. The temporality of birth is encapsulated in the ever-renewed poiesis of nature.Yet the ultimate sense of time concerns not birth but death, as Claudel notes in a passage that Merleau-Ponty cites only in part:“Time is the means offered to all that which will be to be, in order to be no more. It is the Invitation to Death extended to each sentence, to decay in the explanatory and total harmony, to consummate the word of adoration, whispered in the ear of Signes, the Abyss” (AP 57/35, VI233/179). (end)
Natural Time and Immemorial Nature (2009)
ALSO READ TOADVINE ON NATURALIZING PHENOMENOLOGY AT
Naturalizing Phenomenology (1999)
