hiya,
some excerpts from 'the spell of the sensuous' by david abram that are
pertinent to our current discussions.
"the sciences are commonly thought to aim at a clear knowledge of an objective
world utterly independent of awareness or subjectivity. Considered
experientially, however, the scientific method enables the achievement of
greater intersubjectivity, greater knowledge of that which is or can be
experienced by many different selves or subjects. The striving for objectivity
is thus understood, phenomenologically, as the striving to achieve greater
agreement or consonance among a plurality of subjects, rather than as an
attempt to avoid subjectivity altogether. The pure "objective reality" commonly
assumed by modern science, far from being the concrete basis underlying all
experience, was, according to Husserl, a theoretical construction, an
unwarranted idealisation of intersubjective experience"
"The life-world is the world of our immediately lived experience, *as* we live
it, prior to all or thoughts about it."
"It was Husserl's genius to realize that the assumption of objectivity had led
to an almost total eclipse of the life-world in the modern era, to a nearly
complete forgetting of this living dimension in which all or endeavours are
rooted. In their striving to attain a finished blueprint of the world, the
sciences had become frightfully estranged from our direct human
experience.....the consequent impoverishment of language, loss of common
discourse tuned to the qualitative nuances of living experience, was leading,
Husserl felt, to a clear crisis in European civilisation. Oblivious to the
quality-laden life-world upon which they themselves depend for their own
meaning and existence, the western sciences and the technologies that accompany
them were beginning to blindly overrun the experiential world - even, in their
errancy, threatening to obliterate the world-of-life entirely [baudrillard's
'simulacrum', from 'the perfect crime']"
"The earth is thus, for Husserl, the secret depth of the life-world. it is the
most unfathomable region of experience, an enigma that exceeds the
structurations of any particular culture or language. In his words, the earth
is the encompassing 'ark of the world', the common 'root basis' of all relative
life-worlds...Husserl's project culminated in the ongoing attempt to rejuvenate
the full-blooded world of our sensorial experience and consequently in the
dawning recognition of Earth as the forgotten basis of all our awareness."
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"the body is precisely my insertion in the common or intersubjective field of
experience"
"the common notion of experiencing self or mind as an immaterial phantom
ultimately independent of the body can only be a mirage:Merleau-Ponty invites
us to recognise, at the heart of even our most abstract cogitations, the
sensuous and sentient life of the body itself."
"...by this move he [merleau-ponty] opens at last the possibility of a truly
authentic phenomenology, a philosophy which would strive, not to explain the
world as if from outside, but to give voice to the world from our experiencing
situation *within* it, recalling to us our participation in the here-and-now,
rejuvenating our sense of wonder at the fathomless things, events and powers
that surround us on every hand."
"In the act of perception..i enter into a sympathetic relation with the
perceived, which is possible only because neither my body nor the sensible
object exists outside the flux of time, and so each has its own dynamism, its
own pulsation and style. Perception in this sense is an attunement or
synchronisation between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the things
themsleves, their own tones and textures....Merleau-ponty writes of perceived
things as entities, of sensible qualities as powers, and of teh sensible itself
as a field of animate presences, in order to acknowledge and underscore their
active, dynamic contribution to perceptual experience. to describe the animate
life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to
articulate the things *as we spontaneously experience them*, prior to all our
conceptualisations and definitions."
"to define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability
to actively engage us and to provoke our senses; *we thus block our perceptual
reciprocity with that being*....*only by affirming the animateness of perceived
things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing
reciprocity with the world.*"
"...the act of perception is always open-ended and unfinished....we suspend
this participation only on behalf of other participations already going on -
with other persons in the room, with the hard and uncomfortable chair on which
we sit, with our own thoughts and analyses. we always retain the ability to
alter or suspend any particular instance of participation. yet we can never
suspend the flux of participation itself."
"...this is not to deny that the senses are distinct modalities. it is to
assert that they are divergent modalities of a single and unitary living body,
that they are complementary powers evolved in complex interdependene with one
another..."
"...the patterns of a stream's surface as it ripples over the rocks or on the
bark of an elm tree or in a cluster of weeds are all composed of repetitive
figures that *never exactly repeat themselves*, of iterated shapes to which our
senses may attune themselves even while the gradual drift and metamorphosis of
those shapes draws our awareness in unexpected and unpredictable directions. In
contrast...the superstraight lines and right angles of our office architecture,
for instance, make our animal senses wither even as they support the abstract
intellect; the wild, earth-born nature of teh materials - the woods, the clay,
the metals and stones that went into the building - are readily forgotten
behind the abstract and calculable form."
"Once i acknowledge that my own sentience, or subjectivity, does not preclude
my visible, tactile objective existence for others, i find myself forced to
acknowldge that *any* visible, tangible form that meets my gaze may also be an
experiencing subject, sensitive and responsive to the beings around it, and to
me....we might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its
flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself *through* us."
"...speaking itself as a form of behaviour that can be mindful or callous,
truthful or dishonest, in the face of the sentient cosmos. Spoken words here
are real presences, entities that may be cherished -"held tight to my breast" -
or flung carelessly into the world....in indigenous and oral cultures..language
seems to encourage and augment the participatory life of the senses, while in
western civilisation language seems to deny or deaden that life, promoting a
massive distrust of sensorial experience while valorizing an abstract realm of
ideas hidden behind or beyond the sensory appearances."
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