Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language: Dwelling in Speech I
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Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language: Dwelling in Speech I
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| ISBN-13: | 9781783488209 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/05/2017 |
| Series: | New Heidegger Research |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language
Dwelling in Speech I
By Lawrence J. Hatab
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Lawrence J. HatabAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-820-9
CHAPTER 1
Proto-Phenomenology and the Lived World
1. ECSTATIC DWELLING
I begin a proto-phenomenological account by characterizing pre-reflective experience as ecstatic. I use this word in connection with the ancient Greek word ekstasis, literally "standing-outside" and carrying a meaning of absorbed captivation. Ecstatic experience involves an immersion in activity that is not experienced as conscious reflection on a "self" relating to an external action scene; there is simply the doing, an absorbed involvement with the world, without being self-conscious about it. The "standing-out" connotation is meant to capture immersion in an environment, in something outside the self and not simply a psychological state. There is also ecstatic immersion in simply experiencing something, shown in various circumstances of engaged attention or fascination, as in "suspension of disbelief," when we get absorbed in an artistic performance as though it were a real event or inhabit an imaginary world in reading literature. We can also be immersed in a conversation or even in thinking something through without reflective attention to "speech" or "thought." Naturally, ecstatic immersion can be and often is interrupted by conscious reflection standing back from involvement. But I argue that ecstatic dwelling has a certain precedence over conscious reflection, and I hope the details of the coming analysis will be persuasive of that. In any case, ecstatic dwelling precedes the subject-object binary and may be able to resolve or dissolve a host of philosophical problems that stem from dividing reflective thought (beliefs, ideas, concepts) from its supposedly external environment (things, events, activities). One key problem in this regard is radical skepticism.
1.1. Skepticism
The problem of skepticism is a central element in modern thought, as shown in the writings of Descartes and Hume. Doubt can be a healthy disposition, but in modern philosophy skepticism reaches further than specific doubts of this or that idea, all the way to doubts about the very possibility of knowledge or the existence of the external world. Three related assumptions seem basic to this kind of radical skepticism: 1) the principle of indefeasibility, in which no belief can be warranted unless immune from doubt, unless proven to a strict certainty; 2) the division of self and world into subject and object; and 3) the realm of thinking understood as "representing" things in the world. Yet since dwelling is not originally an internal consciousness over against an external world but rather is world-involvement, the notion that subjective consciousness should pursue a demonstration that its environment exists shows that here reflection has disengaged from a prior mode of existence that makes it possible to pose such a question in the first place.
A critique of skepticism from the standpoint of dwelling might be confirmed by considering some telling admissions in the arguments of Descartes and Hume. Descartes was not a skeptic in the end, but he used a rigorous method of doubt in the pursuit of certainty so that any possibility of error or deception could be weeded out of cognition. In Meditations I, Descartes confesses that his attempt to subject normal beliefs to radical doubt meets stiff resistance: "For long-standing opinions keep returning, and, almost against my will, they take advantage of my credulity." He admits that he will never get out of the "habit" of believing in them as long as he takes them to be what they are, "highly probable, so that it is much more consonant with reason to believe them than to deny them." But in order that no such "bad habit" should turn his judgment "from the correct perception of things," he decides to deceive himself and pretend "for a while that these judgments are wholly false and imaginary." One could say that here Descartes is haunted by the lived world, and so the quest for certainty must deploy self-deception and pretense to overcome the intimacies of normal experience (which surely is an honest and revealing admission by Descartes). He goes on to mitigate his pretense of excessive doubt with the assurance that he will not fall into error because here he is "concentrating only on knowledge, not on action." The division between knowledge and action, theory and practice, is familiar in the history of philosophy and becomes perfected in the hyper-reflective posture of radical skepticism. Because dwelling, however, involves an essential practical engagement with its environment, "knowing" cannot be utterly detached from "doing." Accordingly, Descartes's "pretense" might not be a justified methodological tactic but rather a philosophical deception.
Hume's skepticism can be read in a similar manner. In the Enquiry IV.2, after the critique of causal thinking, Hume considers the objection that his practices in ordinary life would betray his skeptical conclusion. Yet he says that the objection is a misunderstanding of his project. As an agent he is "quite satisfied that the future will be like the past; but as a philosopher [my emphasis] ... I want to know what this confidence is based on. Nothing ... has yet been able to remove my difficulty." Later in the text (XII.2), while reiterating the validity of skeptical challenges to basic beliefs and conceding its disconnection from normal existence, Hume says that "the great subverter of excessive skepticism is action, practical projects, the occupations of everyday life." Yet skepticism still flourishes and triumphs "in the philosophy lecture-room" — because as he had said earlier (XII.1), "the slightest philosophy is enough to destroy" common beliefs in things like the real existence of external objects. What Hume calls habit and custom are the living antidotes to skepticism, but such ways of being cannot be decisive for philosophy.
In the course of their skeptical projects, both Descartes and Hume admit that the factical world is existentially compelling but not philosophically decisive or even relevant to philosophy. But when philosophy disengages from this pre-philosophical environment it can run astray, especially when we consider the fact that skepticism itself is a practice in the lived world, a written or spoken offering to an audience, with the aim of having an effect on people's thinking. Accordingly, if skeptics are sincerely uncertain about the external world or other minds, they have to put in doubt the very setting and point of their own endeavor. So philosophy itself (as a communicative practice) undermines radical doubt. Once dwelling in the world is presumed, radical skepticism is dissolved as a problem because skepticism itself is a move in the world.
In dwelling, we inhabit the world as a familiar extension of ourselves; we know our way around, so to speak. Naturally there are unfamiliar elements of experience and in extreme cases familiarity can be utterly undone. But human life could never function well or prosper without a bedrock of comprehension and customary practices that fit us for coping with the world and pursuing what we care about. Because dwelling and world are coextensive, the meaning of "world" must be understood not as the external world in the brute sense of objective surroundings, but as a horizon of meaningfulness or a context of concern — as indicated in something like "the art world" or "He lost his whole world when she died." So when "world" is used in this investigation it pertains to milieus of existential meaning and not simply "objective reality." A world of meaning is phenomenologically prior to objectivity in the strict sense because even objectification must be meaningful (a preferred or proper path to knowledge). The notion of world can be articulated in three ways: the personal-world, the environing-world, and the social-world. It is important to stipulate that these constructions amount to one world with three dimensions, that each dimension is correlative with the others in a reciprocal network, and that no one dimension can be understood apart from the others.
2. THE PERSONAL-WORLD
The personal-world pertains to human selves, not in terms of abstract models of selfhood or identity that are typical in philosophical discussions (consciousness, thinking subject, intentional subject), but rather the personal life that each of us leads, what it is like to live in the world, expressed in first-person language, which is a grammatical indication that experience is mine. In this way, the self is not a "what" but a who, how one is engaged in life experiences and narratives. The personal-world does not connote something intrinsically selfish or egoistic, and it is not reducible to something purely individual or introspective (as we will see); it involves how the world matters to each of us, how everything we do is something we care about, even if what we care about is overcoming the ego, changing the world, or proclaiming the meaninglessness of existence. So statements like "I am a scientist," "I want to help you," or "I am working against injustice" are all expressions of the personal-world.
The personal-world need not have a bearing on objective findings in certain disciplines such as mathematics or natural science, but it cannot be excluded in a comprehensive philosophical examination of any such discipline or any area of life because existential meaningfulness is always animating the area in question — as in the importance of, and commitment to, screening out personal interests in scientific work or the value of, and attraction to, such work. Some disciplines can go wrong if they exclude the personal element and presume to be purely objective (such was the charge against traditional philosophy made by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche). And surely personal concerns are the first and last word for all of us when it comes to human mortality and our fate in the world.
Proto-phenomenology itself begins with attention to first-person orientations that open up the meaningfulness of the lived world, which is suppressed or concealed if the "impersonal" third-person standpoint is assumed to be the starting point and baseline foundation for philosophical investigation. An indicative approach to the personal-world must be careful not to slip into a third-person orientation that bypasses the actual experience of the one taking the approach — as is the case right now when I simply offer this conceptual rendition of the personal-world. The meaningfulness of the world that proto-phenomenology aims to advance will lack animation if it is merely posed as attention to "what it is like" to experience something in general terms. It is important to add "what it is like for me" to experience something. At the same time, it must be stressed that the personal-world is not something merely subjective because it simply initiates a phenomenological method of inquiry and is by no means a restriction to individual selfhood conceived as something distinct from the wider world. Accordingly, the first-person standpoint in phenomenology cannot merely be a matter of introspective mental states, of intentional consciousness, of beliefs and desires related to actions in the world, but rather indicative attention to ecstatic immersion in fields of action. That is why each personal-world is inextricably caught up in the environing-world and social-world.
3. THE ENVIRONING-WORLD
The environing-world names the range of natural, social, and cultural milieus in which the self is situated and which present the affordances that make human action and practices possible in an ecological network. A phenomenological ecology cannot begin with discrete regions of agents and external surroundings, but rather the field-concept of meaning-laden ecstatic immersion. Practical dealings with the environment are a good place to start.
3.1. Immersion and Exposition
I draw a distinction between engaged immersion and disengaged exposition, the latter term meant to capture occasions when we do experience entities as "objects," as outlying things to be observed and examined rather than put to use in practical tasks. Here the word exposition is meant to suggest the "positioning" of a thing "apart" from the self and immersed practice. Immersion, however, does not exhibit such delineations. The phenomenon of usage, in its performative sense, cannot be understood sufficiently by way of exposited descriptions of a user, an instrument, and the activity; we must begin with an indicative concept of use, with what it is like to be using an instrument in a nonreflective manner. When absorbed in writing, I am not explicitly conscious of my hand as such or my pen as an object bearing properties, or even the larger purpose of my writing; these things are recessed as tacit elements in the immersed practice. Not only is object-language inadequate for the phenomenon of immersion, so too is a model of "exchange" between a subject and an object, between intention, perception of a suitable tool, and application of an aim to its execution with the tool. It seems that conscious analyses and inferences cannot fit the smooth, automatic performance of skilled activity. Such activity is not empty or aimless; it is intelligent in being saturated with meaning and purposefulness, though in a tacit manner. Skilled practices exhibit circumspection, or knowing one's way around the practice field and understanding its implications; also capaciousness, or knowing how to do something. Normally nothing we do is out of the blue or restricted to the immediate practice at hand. There are wider spheres of circumspection concerning how the activity fits within an extended field of operation and broader narratives. And capacious know-how is a practical intelligence that is not overtly characterized as mental states or propositional forms (knowing-that); it is fully exhibited in the practice without having to be articulated. More on this shortly.
3.2. Exposition and Contravention
An explicit awareness of intentions and external conditions usually arises when there is some disturbance in the practice. If my pen runs out of ink or feels uncomfortable after a while, it becomes exposited as a thing with properties. The disturbance turns my attention to relevant aspects of the pen (the tip, ink supply, weight, etc.) that are recessed in the activity of writing. I also attend to the purposeful background of the practice in the face of obstacles (I cannot finish writing until I get a refill or another pen). Common reactions to a disturbance (being annoyed or frustrated) show the implicitly purposeful character of the practice, so that meaningfulness is intrinsic to the activity in a way that would not be the case for a robotic writing device that broke down, which would simply stop working. Annoyance presupposes that a disturbance has interfered with something that matters, that is infused with existential import. In any case, disturbances to a practice bring its tacit meaning and recessed features to the foreground, usually with a view toward restoring or revising the practice.
What follows is that the meaningfulness of a practice is caught up with an awareness of finitude and limits. As living beings, we are needful of conditions to survive and prosper; yet such conditions can fail or be lacking, which accounts for the natural fragility of life. Practical disturbances specify something that pervades human comportment, namely that meaning is structurally related to some negative condition of privation or deprivation. The meaning in question here is more than simply conceptual or semantic — for instance, when the meaning of the word success is understood in contrast to its antonym failure — because it has to do with factical meaningfulness, in which the importance, value, and exhilaration of success are experienced in terms of both the benefits of success and the looming possibility of failure. If it were not possible to fail at something, performance would not be perceived as success. The same meaning structure is exhibited in any number of existential juxtapositions: sickness and health, loss and gain, death and life. The indicative concept I assign to disturbances and limit conditions is contravention, in the sense of something that comes (venire) to disrupt (contra) meaningful immersion. Contravention can be shown in matters of breakdown, resistance, obstacles, mistakes, absence, lack, danger, surprise, disorder, and unusual or unfamiliar occurrences. More subtly, even phenomena such as wonder, amazement, and curiosity can be considered instances of, or responses to, contravention, in that ordinary familiarity is disrupted by a break with the commonplace and an opening for fresh discovery. In any case, it is contravention that prompts the shift from ecstatic immersion to exposition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language by Lawrence J. Hatab. Copyright © 2017 Lawrence J. Hatab. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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