I’ve read the majority of Kearney’s Poetics now and find it interesting. I looked him up on the nets and read a few interviews, listened to bits of podcasts, saw a bit of video and what I heard (amongst other things) was his predisposition to avoid the simulacrum-trap of post-modernism. This, I suspect, comes courtesy of his early (positive) religious training in Irish Catholicism; he seems a man deeply interested in ethics and empathy. I get that, although, obviously, I don’t come at those ideas from a religious standpoint.

How his obsession with grounding human meaning in something that we can authentically share (i.e. meaning isn’t a solipsistic illusion) is reflected in his reading of phenomenology and his understanding of imagination is as complex as it is interesting.

He says of phenomenology and imagination:

Three decisive claims made by phenomenology – as it emerges in Husserl and evolves through his existential and hermeneutic disciples – are: (1) imagining is a productive act of consciousness, not a mental reproduction in the mind; (2) imagining does not involve a courier service between body and mind but an original synthesis which precedes the age-old opposition between the sensible and the intelligible; and (3) imagining is not a luxury of idle fancy but an instrument of semantic innovation.

That’s rather a nice summary; and if each point was followed, it would lead to some interesting conclusions about what it is like to be a human being.

Another dimension of his thought about imagination is that it has an orientation to the “other”. This orientation enacts ethics. Throughout the book he examines “Kristeva’s melancholic imagination, Vattimo’s fragile imagination (and) Lyotard’s narrative imagination” each of which presents “an irreducibly ethical scruple.”  I can feel the religiousness in him here, as I do when I read Alasdair MacIntyre, and can’t help but think about Wallace Stevens’ and his underlying assumptions and this apparently required sense of a moral universe.  I do find it interesting that it appears that these ethical thinkers (all Catholics) have been reducing the scope of the claims they make with regard to the seating of this morality, as they must to avoid the old pitfalls of a necessary, but unworkable, god.

There are numerous similarities between these three. Whereas Kearney’s required Phenomenologically-based shift of perspective is explained as imagination ceasing to “take itself for granted and (coming) reflectively to acknowledge its own pre-reflective engagement with everyday lived projects and preoccupations,” Stevens has this as his “supreme fiction” and his requirement that imagination and reality co-adhere for an effective poem/narrative/life.  For MacIntyre these same ideas are present, at least in part, in his notions of dependence and “goods of excellence.” These men are all humanists in the sense that they have seated the human capacity for ethical behaviour at the center of their lives and read it as the center of ours as well. And yet they also seem monks-in-disguise, not humanists but theists: their work seems a kind of secular application of the contemporary Christian man’s tendency to priesthood when those men aren’t in agreement with the dogma and social practices of the institutional church.

Anyway, I’ve gone off topic. It’s just that I find it interesting the similarities in religiosity, ideas about ethics and their apparent shared assumptions about what empowers and/or constitutes imagination.

One last quote from Kearney, to resonate with Stevens’ struggle between imagination and reality:

The ethical potential of narrative imagination may be summarized under three main heading: (1) the testimonial capacity to bear witness to a forgotten past; (2) the empathic capacity to identify with those different to us (victims and exemplars alike); and (3) the critical-utopian capacity to challenge official stories with unofficial or dissenting ones which open up alternative ways of being.

Compare Stevens’ imaginative force: it is the thing that will ultimately return us “not as a god, but as a god might be, / naked among them, like a savage source.” The alternative way of being to which Kearney alludes is this utopian semi-divinity, an ethical, reasonable yet passionate, human being who shares the world of possibility with the “other.” Here is the basic vision of these post-modern Catholics — an utopian ethic founded on the power of human narrative/poetic imagination. It explains their similarities, and their assumptions, but I still haven’t answered my own question. Without the battle – this “challenge” – as the motivational centerpiece, how will the imagined narrative go?

Years ago I knew a woman who told me a story about a Salish woman we both knew. Briefly, the Salish woman would say “track bear” when she was pointing (or referring) to a bear track. She was a Salish speaker and the underlying sense of reality that was instilled in her early years (and was recorded in the rhythms and syntax of her first language) stayed with her. She explained (to the woman I once knew) when asked, that to say “track bear” is obvious since you see the track first and then you see the bear.

Little bits of knowledge like this are like prisms. Turned this way and that they break up what we thought was a singular modality. The relationship between what our bodies receive from the world and what we perceive, and then communicate to ourselves (let alone others) is like white light. It isn’t singular.

For humans there isn’t a case where the world is either about objects and subjects or about events. Demonstrably it is about both. The decision about what to make central (either the subject/objects or the events – the space between) is a cultural decision made in the development of a group of people in space over time. What interests me is the movement a mind can make between bear track and track bear. This is the world of the liminal, the cultural translator, the mind that slips on its own (un)certainties.

I’ve been rather sick for several days. Bad, bad headache and since my daughter is also sick, it’s been frustrating. Can’t think, but still have to operate. Can’t even read much because it ratchets up the pain after not very long. Still, I did read “The Noble Rider” which is an essay by Wallace Stevens from his collection of essays called The Necessary Angel.

I mentioned this book in the August 17 post on Phenomenology, poetry and sense when I felt a connection between the “thing” and what Stevens’ thinks about poetry, imagination and reality. Mind slippage of the sort that track bear track represents is what happens (or what enables) when the certainties of event/or/subject-object are fractured. The slivers left, the “questioning” I talk about in the last thing-post is like the rainbow the prism enables us to see. It is important to remember that the prism doesn’t create it, by the way, it just makes visible to us the constituent frequencies of what normally appears as “white.”

This is why I think that the rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself (last paragraph of that Aug 17 post). White light is not unreal. Neither are the constituent frequencies the “really real” light. They are just as much a product of our visual equipment and our resultant interpretation as is white light. What seems critical to me is that our visual equipment obviously includes eyes, nerves, cerebral processing modules as well as the world of electro-magnetic frequencies and photons: what we perceive is a result of the relationship between what we have evolved to be and what we have evolved within. What I question is where does track bear track come into it? Where does this cultural imagination – the various cultures’ certainty of correct and obvious interpretation of what is seen – obtain? I suppose it must be in the “processing” that imagination has its abode.

All this has led me to question imagination. What is it? I mean there are the Romantics who are sure they know, and Stevens (and other poets/artists of course) has things to say about its relationship to reality and to the mind, as do the Philosophers and Cognitive Scientists. So that’s what I’m exploring.

For me, all of it is still tethered to the idea of “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and in my head “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and “imagination” relate, but how? No idea yet. Just a feeling. It’s a bit like a Tarot card I’m not quite sure where to place relative to others already chosen, and if you read symbols of any sort, you know that position is critical. A new card can seriously derange what one thought was (finally) understood.

In part 4 I ended with this:

So what is the thing itself? A question of course. That’s why it isn’t either a subject or an object. A thing is the foundation which allows concepts to take form and so, of course, is pre-conceptual and why, at best, poetry can only aim its letters and hope to illuminate the invisible door by the sparks contact ignites.

I’ve been bothered by that since shortly after I wrote it (I was trying to go to sleep when the “botheration” surfaced). It is both true and not-true and the not-true bit worries me like a terrier at a towel. Even in my dreams that night, growl, growl, growl.

Then yesterday I was reading The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens.

Only recently I spoke of certain poetic acts as subtilizing experience and varying appearance: “The real is constantly being engulfed in the unreal…[Poetry] is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock.”

I put the book down because it made me think of what a “thing” is and how an understanding of poetry contributes to our understanding of the nature and content of “thingness.”

A “thing” is a question in the sense that by orienting to the world in the questioning mode one makes possible Stevens’ subtilizing as well as the illumination of Stevens’ surface (or the door I referenced in the final paragraph of section 4 quoted above). A thing is not the words of the question, not the verbal question. A thing-in-itself, at least as far as a human being (also a thing-in-itself) can communicate the pre-linguistically experienced world, is a questioning stance. It is a way of experiencing the world that is, evolutionarily, our main way of assessing the world (including the world of our selves). Reason and language are late-comers.

The thing-in-itself that I experience during my morning walk is a questioning of many things: boundaries, kinship, danger, usefulness, pleasure potential. The thing-in-itself becomes a “rock” when I create an answer, and especially when I communicate that answer to myself (think about it) or others (talk/write about it). Poetry can undermine the current “answer” and re-open the “questioning.” This is why a thing-in-itself escapes the subject-object dichotomy, because for that decision to have been made, the thing-in-itself must have disappeared into the concept “rock.” As Stevens puts it, the real disappears into the unreal.

I would argue that a rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself, but not today. All I want to say today is that the rock and the thing-in-itself that I experience pre-linguistically are separate “things” despite their obvious relationship. That is, words are also “things” in the phenomenological sense. But, like I said, not today.

[So it turned out there is a 5th part - I can't seem to let this stuff drop. Anyway it is here.]

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)

In thinking about this sentence, I have really only started to come to grips with the term “things.” My purpose is to understand what the sentence means, to interpret it given the rather odd (from my point of view) relationship between concepts such as “thing” and “freeing themselves” and later the terms “anarchic and non-identical.” How can a thing be anarchic? What does it mean for something to be non-identical when there is no suggestion as to what it is non-identical with?

Summary: a thing in the phenomenological sense is not simply an object in a the universe of either-or. It is not the subject either. These terms are categories that can point to something in the world through language but the resultant word or concept cannot capture the totality of the thing itself.

What is it to be meaningful? Meaning is not inherent in the words but in the context in which the words are used. Can anything be meaningful? Yes. Probably. But what of it? What good is the meaning of the black sun if no other also knows it. Something has both meaning and value if it can be shared and form the basis of narrative development. That is, the shared meaning forms the basis of some other meaning. The value of the letter “e” is in the fact that it extends the envelope of erudition. “Thing” as the Phenomenologists mean it was once a lone “e” but it is not any longer. “Thing” has left its home in base matter and taken on a new conceptual life. Deleuze would be proud!

M. Bruns said “Imagine things freeing themselves” and of course “thing” did just that. But how?

“Thing” had an origin. It came with a much larger, largely unconscious, belief system. It was embedded in a world where “things” were “material object(s) without life or consciousness.” What happened was those tethers were called into question. Is a thing without consciousness? Is it without life? What does it mean to have a “life?” Can “life” be defined? Can consciousness? Isn’t it more a continuum than a black-and-white situation? If that’s the case then isn’t a human being as much a “thing” as a boulder?

Once those kinds of questions get asked the foundational belief system has already begun to restructure. Different kinds of connections get made. It’s not that the whole system goes down. It doesn’t shatter. We need foundational assumptions to achieve meaning out of inherent meaninglessness so we can’t eject conceptual frameworks wholesale but we can make it look as if we have.

Here’s an example: God is the center of the universe for most people in Medieval Europe. Then perspective comes in with the Renaissance. It didn’t make us get rid of the “center of the universe” concept but it did make us look at what we thought “center” actually meant. This new art made us see that the universe that we occupy actually extends from our point of sight and we ended up replacing god in the center with ourselves. Of course to some people it looks as if we destroyed the Medieval belief system but we didn’t really, we just changed some key factors within it.

Imagine what that must have been like at the time. The difficulty some faced in understanding the concept that the universe was to be measured by man’s measure! I’m not saying that Phenomenology is the equivalent of booting god from the center of the universe. Just that the immensity of the difficulty in reorienting our concept of “thing” is as difficult as the pre-Renaissnace man’s task.

For us this is thinking outside the duality of subject/object. Remember W A T E R M – E L O Π ? (See part 2, link at the end of the post.) If we refuse the transparency of “watermelon,” problematize the word and make ourselves question its existence then we stand a chance of opening a doorway into the sub-basement of the conceptual network which supports its meaningfulness in society. If the history of our capacity for insight (and the methods by which we achieve it) is to be taken as a future likelihood, then one way that we can help ourselves meet the challenge of this “new” concept is through linguistic play. That’s what poetry does, and why so many Phenomenologists seem obsessed by it.

In part two I asked what was outside the concept of subject/object and suggested that the way to grapple with this is through embodied cognition. The reason for this is that subject/object is likely to be a linguistic convention grounded on a long-established embodied understanding of the world. My suggestion is that the embodied “knowing” could have resulted in other linguistic orientations that were not subject/object. That it is the case that our physical presence in the world led to the development of these linguistic formulations was not necessarily so. In other words, our biological systems could have led us elsewhere just as the perceptual developments of the Renaissance could have replaced the concept of “center” with the concept of “there.” (Wouldn’t that have been fun! Instead of religions seeking the god-within, we’d have been hunting the god-over-there.)

In part three:

For me the real question is: Does language conscribe reality any more or less than the organization of our senses? I suspect not but since I also suspect that language is a development grounded in sensory structures, I think the question of what’s outside subject and object might be a misdirection at its heart.

So if it isn’t the right question what is? This is the right question. This question is how things “free themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.” It is by unmooring a concept from the question that originated it and the point of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s book What is Philosophy. How change of the Medieval-Renaissance magnitude takes place is that significant questions die and new ones force elemental reconnection. The new conceptual framework that we know as the Renaissance took hold when we found an answer and stopped asking the question.

So what is the thing itself? A question of course. That’s why it isn’t either a subject or an object. A thing is the foundation which allows concepts to take form and so, of course, is pre-conceptual and why, at best, poetry can only aim its letters and hope to illuminate the invisible door by the sparks contact ignites.

Part 1 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense/

Part 2 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense-–-part-2/

Part 3 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense-–-part-3/

Flatland was one of my very favourite books as a kid. Seeing Sagan speak about it was wonderful.

via wimp.com

In part 2 I asked this question. “So what is outside the concept of subject/object and can we understand it?”

The only way I can understand this idea is to acknowledge the world that we cannot grasp through language. But this is unclear. Is there a world we language users can grasp without language? Thought about another way, experience of the world is profoundly changed by language concepts and structures. Still unclear. While probably true, this says nothing about what impacts language concepts and structures. What if those structures are reflections of the pre-linguistic world?

Let me try this:

1. Our species experienced things prior to its acquisition of language.

2. Species without language communicate.

3. Recent research in embodied cognition suggests that intelligence, reason and language are physically grounded.

4. Evolution tends to work by using existing structures and patterns of organization (whether physical or behavioural) and finding new and useful ways to use them.

5. The world is all that is the case. But contra Wittgenstein, I also think that the physical world is enough to explain the language world.

Things get sticky after this.

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)

As a poet and person with a whole raft of unusual perceptual experiences under her belt I find it almost impossible not to experience language as a entity distinct from me. I also find it impossible not to experience the world as a thinking being. I can do it but by dint of mental brute force but I cannot maintain it. Does this mean I believe these things? No. Not without evidence other than my experience of it.

I had a dream some years ago in which my synesthesia played a crucial role. In the dream I come to consciousness inside the head of a bear. That is, I am aware that I am dreaming and I am neurologically tied into the bear’s head. I still maintain my own human circuitry so there are limitations to what each sense can experience but what senses I do have can be reconfigured for the duration of the “ride.” For example, if I was in the head of a hummingbird, I wouldn’t be able to see ultraviolet as the hummingbird can because, as a human being, I simply don’t have those receptors. However, I would be able to use some sense to pick up on those frequencies – perhaps it would come in as a particular tonal group.

In the dream about the bear I smell the world with the bear but what I perceive comes in visually. I see the scent trails as coloured ribbons. The dream allows me to understand that the bear’s relationship to time is different from mine because it can smell time as scent potency. In other words, the bear’s physical (sensory and cognitive) structures organize and limit basic concepts such as time. The same organizational potential must be true for us since we evolved with the same basic environmental forces in place. Some things are important for us to know about and some are not and since no one species can sense all of it, each species has a limited, but viable, range of sensory input available to it. Perceiving too much would not promote longevity. You’d never be able to sort through it fast enough to deal with sudden danger.

So now I have an experience that I think of as a bear’s. My knowledge of bear anatomy almost certainly had something to do with how my mind came to understand the effect of sensory organization on conceptual foundations but has that really anything to do with an actual bear’s experience? And does it matter?

For me the real question is: Does language conscribe reality any more or less than the organization of our senses? I suspect not but since I also suspect that language is a development grounded in sensory structures, I think the question of what’s outside subject and object might be a misdirection at its heart.

Still, we think of memes as operating on people – that memes use people to propogate themselves as genes do. Having said that, there is no way in which human genes or human memes can exist without people. They have no intentions in the reasoned sense of the word. As an example: There are cultural ideas that work poorly in current situated human activities and there are ones that work to foster human feelings of success. The cultural ideas that promote desirable feelings are going to be repeated, i.e. be replicated or spread. There is no need for the idea to have a mind of its own.

I can think of the Phenomenological “thing” like this. Using the gene analogy, words are the bases but perhaps the 5-carbon sugar and the phosphate group are sensory structures and embodied experience and the “thing” that results – the particular gene of this analogy – is independent of us only in the sense that it is first an echo and product of us and our history.

Here is a sentence:

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

This is from a book called Gadamer and Celan “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays. Page 20 if you want to look it up.

Does it make sense?

It’s no good that howl of incomprehension. It bears little weight especially if the ‘plaint is something that comes from the singular,”it means nothing to me therefore it has no meaning.”

More sturdy is the hundred-voice howl. L’élégance du hérisson: what? The mulitudes complaining about  the incomprehensibility of this sequence of letters bears some scrutiny. But if the examination shows that the complainers are all non French speakers then a different kind of examination is required. It’s not that “l’élégance du hérisson” is meaningless, it’s that it is meaningless in this situation. What needs to be studied is not the letter combination and its claim to meaning but, amongst other things, the limitations of the assessors’ assumptions about the nature of meaning.

Still, the fact that most howlers against phenomenology appear to be kin to our non-French judges does not mean phenomenology is in fact sensible in any way other than the one in which Rorschach blots are sensible.

So does the sentence I started with mean anything? Of course it must since the author who wrote it is no dummy, and if nothing else, it means something to M. Bruns. Yet, so what. If it doesn’t mean anything to you (and it didn’t to me either) then what to do about it? Here’s the thing: it might be more profitable to assume that Bruns is speaking a language you only think you recognize. The only other option is to close the book, but then communication cannot occur and I prefer understanding, even if it comes at the cost of learning a new “language” – something at which I do not excel.

I think the key to understanding Phenomenology in some way that goes beyond the individual psychology and cultural orientation of its practitioners is learning to re-encode the words we think we understand. For example, what does “thing” actually mean to Brun? That sort of re-engagement is what I propose to attempt on my own behalf.

The question about whether Phenomenology has a “language” of its own is something I want to answer because the poet in me is attracted to sentences like “Imagine things freeing themselves.” Yet I am sceptical. I mean, really, things “freeing” themselves? How can one understand that in a way that doesn’t provide “mind” to “things” and thereby cast the universe in the image-shadow of all that is human?

So, more on this in these pages as time goes by. I am on a quest.

You may (or may not) be aware of the discovery of many new planets outside our solar system but it has become something of a hot topic.  Universe (that cool blog that recently moved over to ScienceBlogs) had an interesting take on the idea of scale which included the discovery, and  Samuel Arbesman posted an interesting article on what he calls mesofacts that also included the discovery.  He’s right that some things change at a rate that means we just don’t notice them, even things that are important to our continued survival. I blame evolution. We are primed to notice sudden changes —  like the panther that seems suddenly really, really interested in our presence in her and her kits’ personal space. Those kinds of changes make or break our chances for immediate survival and so have taken the lead in our bodies ranking system for what is going to cause a sudden behavioural modifcation (you know like the fight or flight thingy). Often the slow changes (like in climate) do not trigger the hormonal stimulants which jump start behavioural change. After all, a bad harvest or two? We are omnivores, the barley is low? Go eat millet, or the goat, or last year’s walnuts, they last for a long time, even if bitter, and then there’s dandelion greens, it would take a pretty major cataclysm to wipe those suckers out. It is hunger, another kind of hormonal trigger, that causes us to seek out alternate food sources. What it doesn’t do is make us stop acting like giant earth-predators and unbalancing the larger biosphere. That is reason’s role, but it is a newby and apparently not up to the job yet.

As Claire Evans (the writer behind Universe) said, it really is about scale.  She thinks that we are about to experience that wrench that comes with the realization that we are not, in fact, the scale against which the universe developed. And of course what the universe’s non-human scale means is that the things that are most critical to us, the things we think matter the most, almost certainly have no corollary in the vast reaches of all-that-is.

Things like language, mind, awareness, these are human things in that they are the consequence of the evolution of our bodies and the ensuing social change the evolution of our bodies and brains has stimulated (and of course of any other group of creatures that might evolve toward the same evolutionary “goal” of a proactive intelligence capable of rapid learning as a member of a deeply social species). There are so many philosophers that have talked of our capacity for awareness as if it is an attribute worthy of universal acclaim, as if, at bottom, awareness must be a fundamental principle of the universe like mass or the speed of light. This is the power of the meso-world on us. Call it middle earth or midgaard, it is a fantasy universe where things are in fact human-sized and human oriented. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the universe, we do not actually live in middle earth.

Now’s a good time to go watch a short video called The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds.

And that’s just starting with the formation of the earth.  We barely register. In fact the only reason we do is because the creator of the video is human and probably thinks our existence matters. But to be fair I suppose we have made an impact as far as the earth is concerned. Well at least for this particular set of life forms that may well suffer extinction earlier than would have happened without our presence. But extinctions are a regular part of earth history so even this is nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Can you imagine a video “The Evolution of the Solar System in 60 Seconds“? Or “The Evolution of the Universe…”? We wouldn’t be a blip. I mean even the formation of the earth would barely register in the second imagined film.

I sometimes wonder what philosophy would be if we could get outside our middle-earth mindset. And teleology without a human orientation?  That would be fun.  Maybe the universe has been evolving all along toward the mechanisms that make a three toed sloth capable of enormous body temperature variation. Or maybe it is all about bioluminescence. Or the cephlapod ink sac. Or maybe life was just an accident on the way to limestone and the karst lands and their elemental denizens.

Wouldn’t that be fun? — to find out we do inhabit middle earth but that it was created in the image of a set of caves carved by the relationship between water, CaCO₃ and CaMg(CO₃)_2.

Personally I’d rather find out there is no meaning than find out I was an extra in someone else’s drama. That way I can make my own meaning, decide for myself what it all means, and then change my mind depending on how I feel that day. Much more fun, and in keeping with my middle-earth mind.

I mean, really, meaning?  Another of those human qualities that say nothing about the universe, whether big or small. But what else can guide us if not our quest for meaning?

Facts you say? Posh. Tish.

I’ve been thinking about scale and the effects of our middle-earth fixed minds on basic concepts like “substance” better known today as “matter.” And then this morning I ran across Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. So here it is.