Page 9: The example of the left hand touching the right hand - illustrates the coexisting duality of the subject-object in the body, phase shifting between subject and object in a 'gestalt' like effect.
Up to page 14: Thought and our being are based on perception. Perception is grounded in the body. We are confident that the 'other''s body is also perceiving like us, in their own world. We use communication to recognize eachother's perceptive being and to agree on concepts.
Page 15 - As we now know, physics depends upon an incarnate observer.
Up to page 28 - So Merleu-Ponty is attributing the 'crisis' that both physics and psychology are apparently going through, to a faulty ontology that presupposes some existing and consistent system of variables that generates our perception. But of course, these variables could not be defined without our perception. Also how can we perform sociology of the other using our own building blocks! Interesting that he notes how physics is starting to adjust by including perception in its description of the world (I guess referring to quantum physics and the role of the observer or theory of relativity?), but life sciences such as biology and physiology of the senses are unable to do so because this would destroy the entire theory. Basically might run into a loop where our perception is a variable in the way perception is functioning? so “biologists remain more materialists than the physicists”. so a new ontology based on perception is needed, but the hint toward the important part. 'this does not mean that one could perceive without a body' but that we have to re-examine the definition of the body as a pure object. so instead of the body being defined as an objective system functions that generates operates us, it should be looked as the medium and tool of perception that ultimately creates everything else.
Up to page 50 -
Perceptual Faith - The paradox that what we see is the external world in itself, but at the same time it is and experience private to us, generated by us and within us.
Reflection is a proposed the solution to perceptual faith and it is being criticized by Merleau-Ponty. - In reflection, we distinguish the realness of our perception. An imaginary thought is not as consistent as seeing something real in the world. Through our situated body we draw closer to the object and realized the consistency of perception. The actual truth and reality are a in the thought. There is no direct relation to the things themselves and the world is reduced to our solitary idelaistic experience.
the Other is in the same position as me with their own thoughts, and we live together in the “undivided object of all our thoughts”. “There is no problem of incarnation”. They are not behind their body, they are just there. “We have through reflection recognized at the heart of all the situated, bogged-down and incarnated thoughts, the true appearing of thought to itself”
There is no jump from noexistence to existence , instead we have a 'thought-being' that has a certain into probability and consistency. when a perception appears more 'probable' than the previous - it is now the actual real.
There is however a huge problem with the philosophy of reflection, and that is the fact that the actual act of reflection pre-supposes some knowledge of being in the world that is exactly the purpose of the reflection. We wound up with a cyclic argument. There is no explanation to how we posses this ability. There is also no inter-subjectivity of perception. “Once and for all, the being-object is placed before me as alone meaningful for me, and every inherence of the others in their bodies, and of myself in my own is impugned as confusion” (48). There is no intermundane space, that is there is no intertwined perception between me and the other. Each to their own world of thought. And according to reflection I don't need the other in order to reflect, because I always had this ability in me. There is a suggestion that this shouldn't be so. ((49) “My access to the universal mind via reflection, far from finally discovering what I always was, is motivated by the intertwining of my life with the other lives, of my body with the visible things, by the intersection of my perceptual field with that of the others, by the blending in of my duration with that the other durations”
Up to page 57 - Nothingness
Get rid of the notion of subject.
Left with a consciouness that is a void which has the capacitiy for receiving the plentitude of the world - “Being”.
The world is being and I am nothing (52) - But they are in fact two sides of the same coin.
The being is the thing itself and I am 'nothing' - so the being is a negation, a 'negintuition' of nothingness (understanding the nothing intuitively as the negative of everything). A 'negentropy'
In order to rid ourselves of notions such as thought, subject and ego, there cannot be anything 'positive' that defines us. That would be to reintegrate outselves into being.
The nothingness is a 'fissure that deepens in the exact measure that it is filled'.
Because 'being' is ephemeral, and can be replaced by another 'this' (Maybe this refers to relality vs imaginary?), then it implies that there is an emptiness and nothingness on the other side, that can 'contain' it.
Each 'being' is a 'displacement' of other past or future 'beings', not the negation of them, so in reality the fissure is deeper than what fills it.
* Sartre quote that I don't understand. (54) - But should refer to Sartr'e definitions:
Being-in-itself: refers to objects in the external world — a mode of existence that simply is. It is not conscious so it is neither active nor passive and harbors no potentiality for transcendence. This mode of being is relevant to inanimate objects, but not to humans, who Sartre says must always make a choice
Being-for-itself (être-pour-soi): The nihilation of Being-in-itself; consciousness conceived as a lack of Being, a desire for Being, a relation of Being. The For-itself brings Nothingness into the world and therefore can stand out from Being and form attitudes towards other beings by seeing what it is not.
Back to Merleau-Ponty, there's no pre-reflective cogito, there's no subject - What am I? I am the negation of this consciousn experience of 'things'. I am nothing. My identtiy that is my thoughts, my body - those are only at a close distance to the nihalted self. Exterior being.
The world being is a prelongation of the body. Coextensive with consciousness.
People are never tired of saying that man is but a minute
speck on the face of the earth, the earth a speck in the
universe. Yet, even physically, man is far from merely occupy-
ing the tiny space allotted to him, and with which Pascal
himself was content when he condemned the “thinking reed”
to be, materially, a reed and nothing more. For if our body is
matter for our consciousness, it is co-extensive with our con-
sciousness, it comprises everything we perceive, it reaches as
far as the stars. But this vast body is changing continually,
sometimes radically, at the slightest, shifting of one part of
itself which is at its centre and occupies a small fraction of
space. This inner and central body, relatively invariable, is
ever present. It is not merely present, it is operative: it is
through this body, and through it alone, that we can move
other parts of the large body. And, since action is what
matters, since it is an understood thing that we are present
where we act, the habit has grown of limiting consciousness
to the small body and ignoring the vast one.
So what is the other in this world? It is not another 'nothing', there's not such thing. only I am nothing. The other's gaze is part of the external being. “I remain the sole witness of ontogenesis” But do I recognize the other is another focus of nothingness? A subdivision of my nothing/being interaction?
p.60 Page 60-61 seems very important - “to say that I am nothing (in the sense of identity) is to say that I am (in the active sense) my body and my situation”. Can there be more than one?
If I am indeed nothing - non being, then it is also my passivity within being. It means that my situation, body is exposed externally. I am potentially visible.The philosophy of reflection would assume some common ground of thoughts and signs, with each in their own world.
“I do not _know_ the others, in the strong sense that I know myself; I therefore cannot flatter myself in supporting that I participate with them in a thought of the world which would be ideally the same thought. But my perception of the world feels it as an exterior” (Feels?) “I feel at the surface of my visible being that my volubility dies away, that I become flesh, and that at the extremity of this inertia that was me there is something else, or rather an other who is not a thing.”
“my fundamental negation is not complete as long as it has not itself been negated from without, and, by a foreign gaze”
“The experience of the other's gaze upon me only prolongs my inward conviction of being nothing, of living only as a parasite on the world, of inhabiting a body and situation.”
So, it is not as if the other is a thought in my mind or in my consciousness
I am nothing and being is everything. I am situated in the world and so is the other.
Since I'm nothing, everything else in inscribed in being, including my sitatuion and the other's situation. Same with dreams and illusions, they are also part of being (becauase otherwise there is notihingness). Even other peoepl's dreams. “even if what I live at present should reveal itself to be illusory, the critique of my illusion will not cast it out of the world, but on the contrary, will show me its place, its relative legitimacy, its truth”. They way I see it, a dream is just another interactino of our body with the external (in-itself), and it is the same being . The only difference is the the type of interaction. “Being” in dream is not a direct interaction between my situation and the external information. What remains to be seen is the different in effect between “Being” in a dream or situated in the world.
So basically only if the negativism is rigorous and full, it guarantees that everything else is the same being.
“Why is there something rather than nothing”? The nothing could not take the place of something. Being is, nothing isn't
“our reconsturctions and reconstitutions are suspended upon a primary evidence of the world which itself indictates its articulations to me” - The seems to imply to me that any knowledge we gain is through being - the interaction of our situated body with the world.
Hmm what does that say about free will? Some video about answers from the previous book
here Pages 65-68 Speaking of how we can infer Nothing from Being and Being from Nothing. In a pure manner, being is flat. no densities, or ranges of being. Nothingness is absolute. but eventually we discover that it is only in principle and “For itself is encumbered with a body, which is not outside if it is not inside, which intervenes between the For Itself and itself.” - But these are all higher level speculations and significations that do not contradict the initial truth of absolute positivity and negativity - Being and Nothingness.
Page 71 - About The Other, - There is a criticism of Sartre's view of the other as some transcendent thought or concept. This is a solipsistic view of alterity. I am a 'thought', a 'consciousness' (A subject), this is my only access to the world, and the others are my double that I have no access to. In fact - This is an “the ammbivalent or labile relationship with the other - in which, moreover, analysis would rediscover the normal, canonical form, subjected in the particular case to a distortion that makes of the other an anonymous, faceless obsession, an other in general.” This sounds like Stranger Fetishism.
There is an explanation of this in the book Understanding Existentialism:
Indeed, Merleau-Ponty goes on to ask the obvious question regarding whether the Sartrean “solution” really does justice to the alterity or “oth- erness” of the other: he suggests that “this agnosticism in regard to the other’s being for himself, which appeared to guarantee his alterity, sud- denly appears as the worst of infringements upon it” (VI: 79). In other words, Sartre is accused of an agnosticism in regard to the other because he ignores our inherence in Being and because he ignores the way in which otherness is always intertwined with subjectivity. Sartre posits a radical singularity, a void of nothingness that can have no content, and he argues that given this situation the Other should not be theorized except in relation to its effects on the self. In his own way then, Sartre very much wants to preserve the alterity of the Other, despite what theorists such as Levinas have suggested about him. But Merleau-Ponty insists that speaking only of oneself, just like speaking for everybody, also misses an aspect of our experience and he insists that the respect shown for the other’s alterity is only apparent. In the end, Sartre “makes of the other an anonymous, faceless obsession, an other in general” (VI: 72). And Sartre does seem to have no notion of a specific Other, but only this faceless, untouchable Other, who is absolutely transcendent. Indeed, the Other for Sartre is almost a God, which might explain his consistent capitalizing of the term. For Merleau-Ponty, this positing of a faceless, anonymous other is far from the best way to respect the other and nor is it necessary.
So Merleau-Ponty argues that there is something more in the look of other than an existence beaming on my body. There is also a difference between an experience of an animal's look at me and a person's. (Page 72)
Just as if “Being” has the inherent power of the negation of my nothingness, the other's existence also has some inherent power. “Instead of my shame constituting the whole sense of the other's existence, the other's existence is the truth of my shame”
Difficulty (Page 74): How can we even define being and nothingness without being outside of them? Being and nothingness are the only entities that are possible. There cannot be a “Hyper being” which defines Being. Intuively we can only shift our attention from one to the other.
Being is in fact a description of Experience, so the analytic of being is on the “Terrain of experience”, such as vision. The seer is non-being, the world is being and vision is being entering the invisible seer. But how can there really be a self-aware seer that is 'nothing'? How can there be a being that is seen, if it s all there is. There is only “nothingness filled with being, a being emptied by nothingness”.
(p. 76) “This is what one tries to acheive by thinking vision as nihilation. Understood in this way, it makes the In-Itself itself pass to the status of world seen, and makes the For-Itself pass to the status of a For-Itself sunken into being, situated, incarnated”
So there is indeed a problem with this transofrmative act of negation because it's hard to see how it happens. Either vision is a transcendednt operation above being, or that the definitions of nothingness and being are incomplete.
Criticism of Sartre continues - “The analytic of Being and Nothingness is the seer who forgets that he has a body and that what he sees is always beneath what he sees, who tries to force the passage toward pure being and pure nothingess by installing himself in pure vision, who makes himself a visionary, but who is thrown back to his own opacity as a seer and to the depth of being.”
Perhaps what is missing is a more 'complex' metaphysical action of seeing. One that is not just a negation, but an actual physical process.
“Conversely, the imaginary is not an absolute inobservable: it finds in the body analogues of itself that incarnate it” - As I understand it, the imaginary is itself an incarnated action, but the analytic of being/nothingness doesn't explain the depth and differnce.
Pages 77-79 - Important elaboration of the criticism regarding the Other in Being and Nothingness. I will try to summarize:
There can be no other in a 'pure vision'. We can only speculate that there is an invisible behind it that is like us. There is no real 'encounter', just an intuition that we are there exposed to it (Because it exists in being as our body), but he is not recognized as a For-Itsef. I can only think and hypothesize that “If I inhabited that body, I should have another solitude, comparable to that which I have, and always divergent prospectively from it”.
In the Sarterian analytic, if the other is a true For-Itself (a nothing), I can never really perceive it. “It is necessary that the other be my negation, or my destruction”.
For a philosophy that is installed in pure vision, in the aerial view of the panorama, there can be no encounter with another: for the look dominates; it can dominate only things, and if it falls upon men it transforms them to puppets which move only by springs. From the heights of the towers of Notre Dam, I cannot, when I like, feel myself to be on equal footing with those who, enclosed within those walls, there minutely pursue incomprehensible tasks. High places attract those who wish to look over the world with an eagle-eye view. Vision ceases to be solipsist only up close, when the other turns back upon me the luminous rays in which I had caught him, renders precise that corporeal adhesion of which I had a presentiment in the agile movements of his eyes, enlarges beyond measure that blind spot I divined at the center of my sovereign vision, and, invading my field through all its frontiers, attracts me into the prison I had prepared for him and, as long as he is there, makes me incapable of solitude.
Page 79 There is also a problem with making a general statement regarding the 'For-Itself' and how it perceives the 'Other'. Making a statement about the 'For-Itself' is as if speaking in behalf of all of the 'others'. How can I even circumscribe myself a void in being, where the other's identity is?
We have the “gaze of another as bearar of being for itself which is a rejoinder of my own, but capable of petrifying (meduser) my own”. - Merleau-Ponty keeps mentioning the kind of negative effects of a gaze of the other such as shame and fear and constitutive. Why? (méduser - Dumbfound/Stupefy)
Page 81 There is another explanation that is reminiscent of Stranger Fetishim. It cricizes that the problem of the other posed by philosophy is always of The other. An abstraction of the other. He mentions De Beauvoir's “There she came” note that a trio decomposes to three couples. Each relationship with an 'other' is mediated by a third party, starting with the Oedipus situation. So it's not even one other each time. “If the access to the other is an entry into a constellation of others”, then one other can't be the absolute negation of myself, there are more others involved! This is a difficulty to a philosopy in which the other's presence crushes me into the In-Itself. (81)
So to see the other as a true For-Itself, it is a pure negation as me, and since we are both part of the same being, the other should also crush me “Into the dust of my world”. (p.82). The other in fact objectifies me.
Now at page 82 starts the new solution : Instead of crushing me - “It is necessary and suffices tat he have the power to decenter me, to oppose his centering to my own, and he can do so only because we are not two nihilations installed in two universes of the In Itself, incomparable, but entries to the same Being, each acccessible to but one of us, but appearing to the other as practicable by right, because they both belong to the same Being.”
Vision itself is situated. It has a relation to the things. Distance matters. Vision has a field and a range. “Only at very great distances are the things it gives us pure things, identical to themselves and wholly positive, like the stars, and this horizon of the In Itself is visible only as the background of a zone of nearby things which for their part, are open and inexhaustible.” - Are imaginary things also like the stars? How about VR?
Perhaps “every relation between me and being, even vision, even speech is [not] a carnal relation, with the flesh of he world.”
From the book Guerrilla Metaphysics: “For Merleau•Ponty, it is the Flesh of the world that serves as a sort of medium or occasional cause, as a molten plasma through which the things and I transmit messages to one another.”
Page 84-85 - Does that mean that when we die we take out being with us? No, being exists witout us as well, we are only involved within it. Our vision and the 'imaginary' our part of our institution and of Being.
Reflective thought : I feel this is a bit unfair (at least to Sartre) that I am being taught of Sartre's Being and Nothingness by Merleau-Ponty, who is teaching it only to eventually criticize and disprove it.
Page 87: “The more one describes experience as a compound of being and nothingness, the more absolute their distinction if confirmed; the more the thought adheres to experience, the more it keeps it at a distance. Such is the sorcery of the thought of the negative”.
Page 88: Being and nothingness are logical idealizations “We are invited to rediscover behind vision , as immediate presence to being, the flesh of the being and the flesh of seer
There is a world, it is something, and in order to be it does not have to nullify the nothing. That something also includes 'experience'.
Page 89 - Summing it up, the prboblem with the philosophy of reflection is that it presupposes some positivity of the self that has no grounds, a subject that has functions out of nothing. The opposite problem with the philosophy of nothigness is that the self is such a pure negation that it is impossible for it to function in any way in order to explain our experience of thw world when it is combined with being. It doesn't explain our interaction with being that produces experience.
Let's try to define Being as a Dialectic instead of a locgical negation - Being becomes a system of interactions, with several entries. It does not have an absolute definition but it is instead a prcoess. a thought that itself traces its own course, that finds itself by advancing. The nature is implicated by the movement itseld and is not viewed from above.
This seems like an abstract description of Dialectic as something that is defined by the process of its 'emergence' and not outside of it. For Being it seems that the idea is to not have a generic logical definition but instead a process that defines itself in each of us.
Then isn't the relation beween Being and Nothingness is a sort of Dialectic that happens for us? ”Is it not thought at work within Being , in contract with Being, for which it opens a space for manifestation, but in which all its own initatives are inscrbied, recodrded, or sedimented, if only as erroes surmounted, and take on the form of history which has its sense, even if it turns in circles or marches in zigzags?“
It is what we're looking for, but we need to be careful of not freezing the dialectic into a thesis that will sink into an absolute positivity. Because then we end up again with sinking toward absolute negation between the positive and the negative. In Hegel, we have God as absolute subjectivity that negates himself in order for the world to be. God makes himself man. In the same way we have Sartre's Being and Nothingness, only without the theological context. In both cases “the thought ceases to accompany or to be the dialectical movement, converts it into signification, thesis or thing said, and thereby falls back into the ambivalent image of the Nothingness that sacrifices itself in order that Being be and of the Being, that from the depths of its primacy, tolerates being recognized by the the Nothingness.”
Merleau-Ponty goes even further and defines the 'common' dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis as bad dialectic, one of staements. “The good dialectic is that which is conscious of the fact that every thesis is an idelization, that Being is not made up of idealizations or of things said, as the old logic believed, but of bounds wholes where signification never is except in tendency, there the inertia of the content never permits the defining of one term as positive, another term as negative, and still a third term as absolute suppression of the negative by itself.”
Page 95 addresses the obvious concern that this definition of dialectic falls into absolute relativism and skepticism with no truth. This is not the intention, there is still an interrogation into the process, with things excluded out of the dialectic being a pure negative. What we avoid is a final positive.
Page 96-99 - “We are not asking ourselves if the world exists; we are asking what it is for it to exist.” - But even that if not radical enough.
We could be tempted to think that this question can be answered just by using language; signs, meanings. But of course this is not true. Words in language do not have any universal truth or evidence to them. It is operative and constituted using the definitions that we already have. “a being to the second order”. This means we should anyway avoid to seek the “source of meaning” in significations. Those are of our psycho-physical constitution.
It is this line of thought that led to the cogito, but the cogito still put thought as higher evidence than Being. That it was certain that there is a thought between Nothingness and Being. But in the end, it was realized that thought is not supported by anything and does not have in its power to generate Being, so it got pushed out, and there is only Being and Nothingness. Existence is negativity.
”The long evolution that had moved the positive from the world [me: realism] over to the side of the consciousness [idealism], which had become the correlative of the world and its connecting principle, but at the same time prepared philosophy to install non-being as the pivot of being - would be abruptly concluded at the extremity of idealism by the rehabilitation and the primacy of the In Itself. [Sartre]“
With Being and Nothingness , being is a “flat projection”. Because of its absoluteness and its absolute negation with nothingness, it loses the sense if being situated, having a limit, the process of vision. “There is no longer any some-thing and no longer openness, for there is no longer a labor of the look against its limits”.
This limit is not some physical boundary that can be delineated, it is because he who sees the world is also of it and is in it”
So philosophy is not about explaining our relation to the world using terms that were formed by that relation, and it is also not about acknowledging an all encompassing positive being. “rather, it remains a question, it interrogates the world and the thing, it revives repeats or imitates their crystallization before it.” “we can see how the world comes about”
Page 101 - Being and the thing itself are not something that we can 'hold with forceps', 'immobilize under the objective of a microscope'. We need to let them be, witness their continued being, follow their movement.
We will use language not to signify the world, but rather to open ourselves upon being and “make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin.”
Page 104 - We can ask endlessly about definitions and origins, and it can never end. The only thing certain is the 'simultaneity of the world'. Philosophy is about continuously interrogating the process of being in the world. The chapter ends with this poem from Art Poetique by Claudel:
From time to time, a man lifts his head, sniffs, listens, considers,
recognizes his position: he thinks, he sighs, and, drawing his
watch from the pocket lodged against his chest, looks at the time.
Where am I? and What time is it? —
such is the inexhaustible question turning from us to the world.
Interrogation and Intuition (page 105) - Rudimentary question such as Where am I? and What time is it? assume our definitions of time and space and simply ask at which point of them we are now. Philosophy asking whether the world even exists, still relies the same perceptual faith that there is a world, and on our definitions, they are just more basic assumptions.
When one takes a methodic doubt into an extreme abstraction and generalization - the entity of “Being” is created - But this is a choice, a voluntary action. “It is no longer a fluidification of the certitudes but a deliberate withdrawal, a refusal to emobdy them.”
Science deals with more concrete and meaningful Beings and essences, yet still contrived. “The question remains unsettled in scientific knowing because in it truths of facts and truths of reasons overlap and because the carving out of facts, like the elaboration of the essences, is there conducted under presuppositions that remain to be interrogated, if we are to know fully what science means”.
Philosophy's purpose would be know what History and World and Being are. What it means to be in the world. 'to form finally the signification “Being”'
We can speak about the some thing that is like to be in the world as Essence - If there is a world then it is necessary that it observes some “structural law”. The essence doesn't prove that there is a world, but these are the tools by which we can establish a Pure spectator. It doesn't give us the primitive on Being, just its style. But this style is generic and wholly inclusive inasmuch as it assumes anything in our experience.
My essence interconnects with the world and with others in the fabric of one sole Being. The way I see it -Being is this absolute physical world of thoughts and things and we - the subjects are essences in that fabric, which I know as my 'experience' in this world.
“The actual Being [world matter?], [which] is the ground of the predicative Being [abstract though?]” The essence doesn't uncover the world and Being as facts but animates and organizes their facticity.
In order to know the essence we could try looking from outside of experience, but that would mean reducing ourselves to nothingness.
Every ideation is backed by my duration in the world, which the way I I see it is similar to situation, or real entity's status in reality - our morphing memory foam that co-exists with other durations.
We can't soar over our own essence, but maybe we can recognize its anti-thesis, the properties that are not as essential and necessary as the essence.
Maybe a
Kosmotheoros could not the essence. Interesting reference to
this essay. But's there is no such gaze that has no locality, even the attempt of pure gaze happens in a point of time and space. The
visible is not in time and space per se, but time and space extend beyond it and hide behind it.
“The visible can thus fill me and occupy me only because I who see it do not see it from the depth of nothingness, but from the midst of itself;
I the seer am also visible. What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present,
and of the world is the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogeneous with them; he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself and that in return the sensible in his eyes as it were his double or an extension of his own flesh.”
“The things only exist in the end of the rays of my spatiality”. “emitted at the secrecy of my flesh”.
“The vision of Being is not forming itself from elsewhere, but from the midst of Being”
Notes from the trip to Närpes - Learning, including ideation, is a physical transformation of ourselves in time and space. It would make sense that the transformation is more effective if we learn while moving our body. Learning by doing. How about VR? VR dosn't manifest the corporeality of things and of others.
Facts and essences are always abstract.
We live in a simultaneity of space, an inter-twining of space and time. From my previous studies of physics, I understand the space-time is nothing but a field of information updates and our life takes part in that.
Speech is the acting out of ideas. They don't have any pure signification without our action. Thought, speech, writing.
“If there is an ideality, a thought that has a future in me, that even breaks through my space of consciousness and has a future with others, and finally, having become a writing, has a future in every possible reader, this can be only that thought that leaves me with my hunger, and leaves them with their hunger, that betokens a generalized buckling of my landscape and opens it to the universal, precisely because it is rather an unthought. Ideas that are too much possessed are no longer ideas; I no longer think anything when I speak of them, as if it were essential to the essence that it be for tomorrow, as if it were only a tacking thread in the fabric of the words.”
This is very much reminiscent of Walter Freeman and theories of neurodynamics, the movement on the edge of chaos. Except Flesh brings consciousness into this game of movement.
“The intent to reach the absolutely hard being of the essence conceals the mendacious pretension to be nothing” - Any attempt we make to reach an absolute truth that is independent of ourselves, of our own being, means that we have to reduce ourselves to Nothing - But then how is the question formed to begin with?
Page 122 - Hard questions of consciousness and the physicality of experience - What is then the relation between our perception of the things and the things? Is the visible (the qualia) a fusing, a conincidence of ourselves with the things? “their natural being is so full that it seems to envelope their perceived being, as if our perception of them were formed within them”. But that would make our experience impossible, because if we fuse with the external, we are no longer a self, or if it's all qualia, then there is no thing. And how about past? Is recalling memory really coinciding with the past? Do we really hold in ourselves the pure state of things? And if we don't and the memory is an invisible, how does it coincide with the reality, with the actual past?
The experience of the visible is not a fusion with the things. “because my eyes which see, my hands which touch, can also be seen and touched, because, therefore, in this sense they and touch the visible, the tangible, from within, because our flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things with which nevertheless it is surrounded, the world and I are within one another, and there is no anteriority of the percipere to the percipi, there is simultaneity or even retardation”.
Perception is a 'fleshy' localized action within a world, coinciding with other visions and visibles, but I note that this still doesn't explain what experience is made of and how is it possible for it to coexist in this fabric?
The experience is not a fusion but “a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well we into the things.”
So here (Page 123) starts the basis of intercorporeality - Is it the look of the other that reminds us that we are not nothing, not fused into the world, but an interplay? How would that fair when it is the look of a thing, of a machine, even if controlled by a human. An extended look that we must reflect on. Merleau-Ponty does talk about how things pass into us, not just other humans. animals?
We always maintain a strange distance, a divergence from the thing itself. A coinciding from afar. We return back to the things themselves using language (page 125) - A manifestation our being and living within the things. The book Circulating Being refers to this as a Diacritical Opposition type of hermeneutics:
Meaningful experience itself depends upon a “deflection,” a difference. Noncoincidence is not an alienation,
but a condition for meaning and the appearance of anything at all. The body and language are not, he tells us, “screens” over Being, preventing us from grasping the real goods, but are the differences which are productive of meaningful experience. In fact, body and language are not transcendental or anthropocentric conditions foisted upon being, but rather the very differentiations of experienced being itself, its own conditions of appearance, its own “syntax”.
Language is the most valuable witness to being, it's not a pure representation or, if there was coincidence, it would be completely false since it is distanced from the raw experience. The raw spoken word, the action, is the style of Being and how we interact with the world. Not just philosophy but also poetry and theater.
So how do we gather this distance between Being and the thing itself? Between experience and our knowing of Being? Without being nothing and without being fused or by assuming some knowledge of reflection. This requires a discussion regarding raw experience. Qualia
The intertwining - The Chiasm
First we must acknowledge that the qualia itself is an interaction of the seer with the flesh / pregnancy of things. as though it knew them before knowing them. Because context changes the raw experience of the thing. This shows as well how much our experience, is also of the world, and we are too. two systems are applied upon one another.
Visibility of the visible, just like the touch of the tangible is a bodily interaction. embodied. Anything visible is also tangible, belongs to the same world. Every vision takes place somewhere in the tactile space. vision is a palpation with a look. Just as when touching I can shift my attention to my body being touched, when looking I can shift my attention to my body being seen. Interesting thought experiment
The true nature of things is hidden behind the thickness of the flesh, but is that thickness that constitutes our interaction with the world.
sensing and being sensed is “one sole movement in its two phases”
thought: I am still wondering about how we can physically define that qualia. Perhaps as an intrinsic physical state, just like any matter has its own physical style, but our style is also made of qualia. But it's important to note that there is no delimiter, there is no inside movement and outside movement, only one movement of a body in the world.
Page 139 - Because of this intertwining of the seer and the visible, “there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity – which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate to it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen”.
This thing called 'flesh' is not 'matter' as we know it nor a factual 'mind', it is in fact an element of being. It's the time and space localized mode of the world, which includes the act and substance of seeing and also of matter.
Page 140 - Important regarding VR and virtual interaction - Because the other things have this same element of Being, their interaction with out experience is the same as our bodily interaction with the world and that's how we determine their facticity! The difference between the virtual and the real is distinguished because our vision is a physical fleshy/elemental interaction with the world that we recognize in the things. We see that the things are real because our body is real while seeing them.
“The visible which is yonder is ultimately my landscape” - Noting this use of the word landscape, it reminds of Walter Freeman's brain landscape of attractors.
Page 140 - Intercorporeality (Finally)
Starts with the discussion about the unity of consciousness over the entire body, the unity of experience (not divided according to sensing organs). This relates to the
Binding Problem Then, other bodies could be opened into the world as much as we are. But how do we recognize that?
“Their landscape interweave, their actions and their passions fit together exactly”, Our carnal relation with the visible “brings to birth a ray of light that illuminates all flesh and not only my own”. “it suffices that I look at a landscape, that I speak of it with someone. Then, through the concordant operation of his body and my own, what I see passes into him”, “I recognize in my green his green”, “an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever”
So it is our fleshy, physical, bodily interaction with the world, and the way we grasp the world physically interacting back at us, we are able to recognize the same style of being in another body.
“What is open to us, therefore, with the reversibility of the visible and the tangible, is – if not yet the incorporeal – at least an intercorporeal being, a presumptive domain of the visible and the tangible, which extends further than the things I touch and see at present”
“There is a circle of the touched and the touching, the touched takes hold of the touching; there is a circle of the visible and the seeing, the seeing is not without visible existence; there is even an inscription of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in the tangible – and the converse; there is finally a propagation if these exchanges to all the bodies of the same type and of the same style which I see and touch – and this by virtue of the fundamental fission or segregation of the sentient and the sensible which, laterally makes the organs of my body communicate and founds transitivity from one body to another”
This recognition, of ourselves as visible and the other seer, emphasizes the fact that we are actually visible by another, that we interact through this flesh with another. This gives meaning to our movement, our action. “henceforth movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression”
The
paradox of expression, according to
this book is the fact that
“that which the work seeks to express (the expressed) does not preexist the act of expression” - Maybe he means that the expression is a result of our fleshy interaction with the other, saying something about us, but triggers something different once expressed.
There is also a felshy vocal interaction , even if the voice is different or even the language, we recognize the physicality of the voice, the breath, the throat - it also expresses.
Page 145 - Starts the discussion of the relation between the flesh and the idea.
First regarding the development of the body as a seer -
“the seer is being premeditated in counterpoint in the embryonic” - if I understand correctly, the body becomes a seer because it is of the fleshy element, it develops (evolution?) this ability because it is of the world. There is
criticism about this neglecting the role of the carrying mother in inter-corporeal development.
Merleau-Ponty speaks of our power to shift attention, the gestalt, pivoting the flesh, that is the mode of the thought and the idea.
The little phrase in the
Sonata in Proust's
In search of Lost Time that is associated with love. That is the invisible that is founded on the visible, intersects with the flesh. They owe their authority to the sensible. The idea is
“not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being.
* Perhaps the idea is our intrinsic state of a fleshy interaction with the world, not the interaction itself, but the change of our intrinsic state.
* In any how, what is the experience of VR? Is it between the visible and the invisible? The experience of music is a carnal experience that triggers the invisible. VR is an embodied experience. What about playing a game? This is about the techno-flesh.
* In my theory, there is a difference in our capacity for transformation that is dependent on the corporeality of the situation, of our interaction and participation. And social transformation depends on inter-corporeality.