[MD] Husserl on science and the life-world; Merleau-Ponty on the participative nature of perception

[gav]

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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