Lovers of Sophia

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by Jason Reza Jorjani


  two observers traveling over vast astronomical distances at different

  speeds – which is a precondition of concluding that time flows at a

  different rate for them – is dismissed as “merely psychological”, the

  approximation of the entire cosmos qua Object is being dwarfed by a gigantic observer that stands over it as if it were a scale model.22

  Losing sight of “that upon which we have an openness” only “that upon which we can operate” is taken to be Real.23 Merleau-Ponty goes on to refer to the “sovereign gaze” that seems to find “the things each in its own time, in its own place, as absolute individuals in a unique local and temporal disposition” as that of a giant or titan that he cal s the kosmotheoros or cosmic theoretical observer.24

  In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty claims to be

  making his way toward “the problem of the world.”25 He elaborates on this by restating it as an attempt to understand how what is not

  nature is a “world,” and how a visible and an invisible world can be

  formed as well as what the relationship between them may be.26 It is

  a question of how we have an openness to the world that does not

  preclude occultation, of how occultation can take place amidst the

  20 Ibid., 16.

  21 Ibid., 17.

  22 Ibid., 18.

  23 Ibid., 18.

  24 Ibid., 113.

  25 Ibid., 6.

  26 Ibid., 27.

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  il umination of the world as such.27 Upon reflection, the perception of things and the phantasms of imagination can be understood as

  two modes of “the ideality of the world.”28 A reflection or meditation that understands the “world” as an ideality “liberates us from the

  false problems posed by bastard and unthinkable experiences” in

  accounting for these phantoms as apparitions of what objectifying

  thought marginal y excludes; that which is so excluded haunts what

  is taken as ‘objective reality’ by returning from its fringe.29

  The imaginary is framed as un-real and as consisting only of

  things “half-thought, half-objects, or phantoms… disappearing

  before the sun of thought like the mists of dawn” when “the real

  becomes the correlative of thought… [and] the narrow circle of

  objects of thought…”30 Our “power to re-enter ourselves” and our

  “power to leave ourselves” is intrinsic to the possibility of a world of lived experience – a “possibility of a whol y different type” than those framed in advance by objective thought, and one that maintains

  “a secret and constant appeal” to what is objectively taken to be

  “impossible” but remains integral to the world of lived experience.31

  Merleau-Ponty elaborates: “It is not because the world called

  ‘objective’ has such or such properties that we will be authorized to

  consider them established for the life world… And, conversely, it is

  not because in the ‘objective’ world such or such a phenomenon is

  without visible index that we must forego making it figure in the

  life world.”32 This is relevant to all paranormal phenomena, what

  Merleau-Ponty refers to as “bastard and unthinkable experiences”

  when they happen spontaneously rather than being elicited in a

  laboratory where they are liable to pose “false problems.”

  27 Ibid., 28.

  28 Ibid., 29, 31, 47.

  29 Ibid., 31.

  30 Ibid., 30.

  31 Ibid., 34.

  32 Ibid., 157.

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  The “seat of truth within us” is this “unjustifiable certitude of

  a sensible world common to us…”33 Prior to being convinced by

  Descartes that thought is our reality, “our assurance of being in

  the truth is one with our assurance of being in the world.”34 Our

  experience of “the true” – in distinction to error and falsehood –

  is primarily bound up with the tensions between our perspective

  on things and those of others.35 The consciousness of “truth” – of

  a perspective over something that others ought to be in agreement

  with – presupposes an intelligible world of a kind that connects the

  perspectives of our private worlds and allows a transition between

  them, as in those instances when I enter the perspective of another

  to offer him a response to a question that he has not yet voiced or a

  rejoinder to a thought to which he has not yet given voice.36

  This unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world that we have

  in common that is not any of our perceptible worlds and is thus

  in a sense an “intelligible” world – but not in an abstract sense –

  is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as “the perceptual faith”, a faith

  which science presupposes but does not elucidate.37 The objectivism

  of science excludes just those phenomena that clue us into the

  common world that abides as the grounding for all ‘truths.’ Insofar

  as the scientist attempts to secure all things – including persons

  taken as things – in an “objective” manner, that is, as entities that

  are variables with algorithmical y functional relationships to one

  another, he strips away as “phantasms” everything about beings as

  we encounter them.38

  In Merleau-Ponty’s view this objectification of beings involves

  a reciprocal subjectification of those phenomena that, from its

  perspective, remain invisible as if they were also things hidden

  behind certain of the objects and as if one could see through to

  33 Ibid., 11.

  34 Ibid., 12.

  35 Ibid., 12.

  36 Ibid., 13.

  37 Ibid., 14.

  38 Ibid., 14–15.

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  lovers of sophia

  them by gaining a certain angle on them.39 These are “psychological”

  phenomena when they are framed in terms of objectively conceived

  physical phenomena.40

  Merleau-Ponty notes that just as in the case of physicists, the

  psychologists can only circumscribe the irrational in an eliminative

  manner, in other words, limit it.41 They cannot exorcise it, as they wish to. This is because the “irrational” is itself constructed as the excluded remainder of both the objective and subjective modeling

  of nature. This normalization defines the “para normal” as such.

  The task is not to affirm experiences of the irrational that

  break through this framing or “escape” it as another anti-scientific

  “psychical” order of facts in the manner that Spiritualism does when

  it opposes itself to the materialism that has become prevalent in the

  wake of Descartes.42 Rather, one must deconstruct the “objective”

  and the “subjective” idealizations together by demonstrating the

  manner in which they are constructed – rather than given – from out of the “life world.”43 This “life world” is that lived experience

  that we have through our field of embodiment – but not our bodies conceived of as “objects” that house “subjects.”44 The biologists are

  now more materialist than the physicists, who for their part have

  had to come to terms with the psychological dimensions of their

  work.45

  The basic concepts at work in Psychology remain essential y as

  mythical as the governing ideas of archaic societies.46 In their quest to grasp laws of subjecti
ve experience or the function of mental

  acts in terms analogous to physical laws, psychologists not only

  39 Ibid., 19.

  40 Ibid., 19–20.

  41 Ibid., 25.

  42 Ibid., 22.

  43 Ibid., 18, 26.

  44 Ibid., 18, 27.

  45 Ibid., 26.

  46 Ibid., 18.

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  fail to recognize the mythic or totemic structures enduring in their

  methodology, they also render themselves incapable of forwarding

  an adequate social psychology of archaic cultures.47 Laboring under

  the assumption that the “magical” experiences of primitive peoples

  or their account of a primordial temporality very different from our

  own chronological projection of time are merely “subjective” and a

  function of relative ignorance is going to foreclose an understanding

  of those cultures. It also precludes an insight into the way that magic and mythical time are still at work, albeit in an occulted fashion, in contemporary modes of thinking, above all in Science.48

  So it is fair to say that Hegel views psychic phenomena and

  uncanny abilities as a holdover from pre-rational, and predominately

  unconscious, human cognitive functioning. In fact, he sees an

  inverse relationship between psychic ability and the analytical

  intellect. Adept psychics are atavisms and their abilities should in

  no way be seen as an alternative to much more reliable modern

  scientific or technological means of acquiring the same information

  or accomplishing the same aims with which such individuals

  were once tasked. Nevertheless, pretending that such paranormal

  phenomena are merely hal ucinations or delusions is unscientific

  and, in Hegel’s view, the progressive and phased evolution of human

  understanding toward the perfection of Science qua “Absolute

  Knowing” with its attendant utopian socio-political implications,

  cannot come about until and unless there is a scientific recognition

  and contextualization of these increasingly anomalous phenomena.

  By contrast with this progressive exorcism of the paranormal by

  Science on the part of an arch-rationalist, Merleau-Ponty looks at

  scientific research against the backdrop of an inherently irrational

  life-world that is “wild” in nature before being tamed by any

  cultural y and historical y conditioned system of belief and practice.

  Paranormal phenomena, or what Merleau-Ponty cal s “bastard and

  untameable experiences”, can never be objectively comprehended

  by scientific theorization. Consequently, Science does not afford

  47 Ibid., 23–24.

  48 Ibid., 24, 26.

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  us a mirror of objectively existent structures in Nature. In fact, the form of subjectivity characteristic of the theoretical observer of the cosmos is itself a god-like archetypal projection, similar to the gods of less sophisticated tribal societies but infinitely more powerful in its world-conquering and world-forming capacity. The kosmotheoros

  is a gigantic modern totem.

  While this seems terribly abstract, Merleau-Ponty attempts to

  elucidate this idea with reference to the experience of artists. This

  is not only helpful in itself, it also affords us an opportunity to draw a sharper contrast with Hegel’s paranormal phenomenology by

  comparing Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of art to Hegel’s theory

  concerning the epochal evolution of consciousness and the end of

  art.

  Merleau-Ponty compares the spectrality of the kind of idea he

  is attempting to evoke to musical ideas that we do not possess but

  that possess us in the way that the virtuoso musician experiences

  possession when he “is no longer producing or reproducing the

  sonata: he feels himself, and the others feel him to be at the service of the sonata; the sonata sings through him or cries out so suddenly

  that he must ‘dash on his bow’ to follow it.”49 The cohesion of the

  idea is “a cohesion without concept” of the kind that we find in “the

  moments of the sonata.”50 This is also the nature of the cohesion of

  my body with the world. It is “an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions.”51 This element brings a

  “style” of being with it that makes facts have a meaning and be ‘true’

  about something in a certain way. He also evocatively describes it

  as a “rarefied flesh” and a “glorified body” that come together with

  “the massive flesh” and the “momentary body” that we ordinarily

  experience.52

  The “primordial property” that belongs to the flesh “of radiating

  everywhere and forever,” which effects “the reversibility of the visible 49 Ibid., 151.

  50 Ibid., 152.

  51 Ibid., 152.

  52 Ibid., 148.

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  and the tangible” is also what allows me to have a relationship to the other as if he were my alter ego because “it is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us…

  which extends further than the things I touch and see at present.”53

  It is what makes it possible for us “to be open to visions other than

  our own.”54 This reversibility is also that of “sound and meaning,”

  or “speech and what it means to say”, so that if I am close enough

  to the other I can hear his meaning even if he has not spoken it in

  words and the “sayable” has metamorphosed into “a gaze of the

  mind, intuitus mentis.”55 Even the possibility of psychokinesis seems to be implied by this understanding of worldly embodiment as “the

  flesh”, when Merleau-Ponty adds that: “there is even an inscription

  of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in the tangible [that]

  founds transitivity from one body to another.”56 Final y, recognizing

  the folding of the “actual, empirical ontic visible” back on itself into an invisible that is not its shadow but what principal y renders it

  possible, takes us beyond the duality of thought and extension just

  as it deconstructs the dualist distinction between the visible and the invisible, revealing them to be the obverse of one another.57

  Merleau-Ponty observes that when I think of a certain place

  unreflectively and in an absorbed manner, I am not in my thoughts but at the place even if my body is sitting at this table and my

  gaze ought to terminate at the density of its surface.58 The horizon

  of all such “visions or quasi-visions”, among which clairvoyance

  or “remote viewing” ought to be counted, is still the natural and

  historical world that I inhabit.59 That the observable world can

  withdraw in visions that allow us to be present at places other than

  those wherein a scientist would locate our measurable bodies, so

  53 Ibid., 142–143.

  54 Ibid., 143.

  55 Ibid., 144–145, 154–155.

  56 Ibid., 143.

  57 Ibid., 152.

  58 Ibid., 5.

  59 Ibid., 5.

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  lovers of sophia

  that we lose our spatiotemporal reference markers in such a way as

  to wonder whether we have ever real y had them in the sense that

  we thought we did, brings us to ask whether any sharp distinction

  ought to be legitimately drawn b
etween the world of perception and

  the fabric of dreams.60 Even dreams have a certain logic, or at least a finite and bounded structure.

  The purest ideality is still not free from horizon structures: “It

  is as though the visibility that animates the sensible world were to

  emigrate, not outside of every body, but into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning

  the flesh of the body for a new flesh – that of language, and thereby

  would be emancipated and longer-lived, but not freed from every

  condition.”61 Merleau-Ponty recognizes that “there is no essence

  ( wesen), no idea, that does not adhere to a domain of history and of geography.”62 This does not mean that ideas so situated are therefore

  inaccessible to those in other domains than the ones relevant for

  these essences, but that in view of the fact that “the space or time of culture is not surveyable from above,” any more than that of “nature”

  is, it remains the case that “communication from one constituted

  culture to another occurs through the wild region wherein they all

  have originated.”63 This wilderness is the preserve of artists, not the domain of allegedly ‘objective’ or object ifying scientists who tacitly presuppose a materialist ontology.

  My relationship with the world is not a relationship with

  an object. It involves, as an ever-present possibility, “a sort of

  dehiscence” that “opens my body in two” so that it becomes not only

  my body looking and touching, but my body looked at and my body

  touched. In this intuitive “reflection” there is a leaving oneself and retiring into oneself, a kind of lived distance with respect to oneself.64

  The body sentient and body sensed are two phases of a single

  60 Ibid., 6.

  61 Ibid., 153.

  62 Ibid., 115.

  63 Ibid., 115.

  64 Ibid., 124.

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  jason reza jorjani

  movement that incorporates into itself the whole of the sensible, in

  other words the “flesh of the world.”65 My body is no more an object

  than the world is.66 Merleau-Ponty notes how painters sometimes

  remark on the way in which they feel looked at by the things that

  they observe so intently as if to capture their essence.67

  One group of artists that would certainly have been familiar with

  this uncanny experience are the Surrealists. The origins of Surrealism in Paris are as dingy as the story of any occult movement could ever

 

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