WHO AM I?

Hayden White

"The archetypal plot of discursive formations appears to require that the narrative "I" of the discourse move from an original metaphorical characterization of a domain of experience, through metonymic deconstructions of its elements, to synecdochic representations of the relations between is superficial attributes and its presumed essence, to finally, a representation of whatever contrasts or oppositions can be legitimately be discerned in the totalities identified in the third phase of discursive representation. Vico suggested such a pattern of moves in his analysis of the "Poetic Logic" which underlay and informed all human efforts to "make" a world adequate to the satisfaction of the felt needs of human beings, in prerational cognitive processes..... The move from a metaphorical apprehension of a "strange" and "threatening" reality to a metonymic dispersion of its elements into the contiguities of the series is not logical. "

"It must be recalled that the term "fable" here refers, not to a story, but to a kind of naming operation in which the unfamiliar is identified with the familiar,.... ...... Thus for example, the primitive's identification of thunder with anger, caused by the savage man's fear of the sound, and his recognition of it as the emotional state that he naturally associated with that sound presuppose a similarity between the kinds of noises (that made by an angry man and that heard in thunder) and a difference between them (based on the fact that their volumes are unequal). The difference in volume is as crucial as the similarity in tone. The identification of the sound as anger at on familiarizes and defamiliarizes it..... providing the basis for the presumption that it is made, or is a manifestation of a superhuman agency"

Merleau-Ponty - "I" discourse

The phenomenological reduction

Merleau-Ponty interpreted Husserl's "the phenomenological reduction-as an attempted disengagement from the world which we could never be carried to completion- restored our 'wonder' at the strange and paradoxical hold which the world has on us. (130)..... Merleau-Ponty argued that psychological reflection, when consistently carried out. 'outruns itself', and that starting from the question of the relationship between mental phenomena and the objective world, it is ultimately forced to account for the way in which this world is given." (relate to first year)

The intuition of essences

"Husserl was at pains to stress that knowledge of essence was, like knowledge of fact, a matter of seeing: "Essential insight is still intuition, just as the eidetic object is still an object."(135)....

"What set insight into essences apart from insight into facts was that reference could be made to essential objects without advancing the claim that such objects actually exist ( for example, we can recite the essential features of a unicorn without claiming that there really are unicorns).(136) Through a variation of the attributes of an object -real or imagined- one comes to 'see' what is essential to it (for example, bearded and bearded unicorns are possible, but not hornless ones.)"

"...phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty's reading completely transforms the relationship between de facto and the a priori. (140)

From the moment that experience.....is recognized as the beginning of knowledge, there is no longer any way to distinguish....what the world must necessarily be and what it actually is. The unity of sense, which was regarded as an a priori truth, is no longer anything but the formal expression of a fundamental contingency: the fact that we are in a world."

"The notion of essence is borrowed from the world of perception (142), Eidetic analysis is an a posteriori clarification of concrete, factual experience."

The transcendental ego
(the Cartesian Cogito from above)

Merleau-Ponty "was forced to reject the one thing in Husserl's work which gave sense to all of these notions: the transcendental ego. For Merleau-Ponty, the fatal error of the 'intellectualist' philosophies....was their attempt to found all mental activity in the epistemological subject, their attendant inability to recognize that subjectivity is always situated in and engaged in a world, and their failure to see that finitude, temporality, and carnality were not blemishes detracting from absolute subjectivity, but were, rather the only terms on which truth was possible."

The 'ultimate consciousness is not an eternal subject perceiving itself in absolute transparency', it is rather, 'a comprehensive project, or a view of time and the world which...needs to unfold itself into multiplicity'(157). It is rather, 'an I which dominates diversity only with the help of time.'(158). The transcendental ego 'posits a world', the incarnate subject must first ‘have a world or be in a world' and thus has around it 'a system of meanings whose reciprocities, relationships and involvements do not require to be made explicit in order to be exploited'. (159)-page 43

there are acts in which I collect myself together in order to surpass myself. The cogito is the recognition of this fundamental fact. In the proposition: 'I think, I am" the two assertions are to be equated with each other, otherwise there would be no cogito. Nevertheless we must be clear about the meaning of the equivalence: it is not the ' I am' which is pre-eminently contained in the 'I think', not my existence which is brought down to the consciousness I have of it, but conversely the 'I think', which is re-integrated into the transcending process of the 'I am', and consciousness into existence.

Cartesian analysis falsified the experience of the cogito, ...because it failed to see that the body was the vehicle through which we have a world and the means by which we sustain communications with it.

The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and filed for, all my thought and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not 'inhabit' the 'inner man', or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. (165)

‘the problem of the other'

the dichotomies of self and others and of 'for-itself' and 'in-itself more often than not 'seem to be alternatives' rather than poles in communication with one another.

The problem of the other originates with Descartes’ solution to Montaigne's 'What do I know?’

"The other is not simply another part of my world; it is rather an alternative locus around which the world may be organized. With the entry of another person into my visual field."

Dialogue, de-centering and institution, the panorama and the chiasm -themes in Merleau-Ponty.

The non-coincidence of the touching and the touched is not a 'failure' which either be set right by farther analysis or installed as absolute. It is rather, the sort of joining of observe and reverse which is typical of the Chiasm. The analysis of the touched hand must take as its starting point the fundamental lesson that chiasm teaches; ' there is no identity, nor non-identity........there is inside and outside turning around one another... (213)

Self and others are not to be taken as 'positive subjectivities‘, each unknowable by the other. Their relationship is rather that of 'two entries into the same Being', 'two moments of the same syntax'.

"Vision ceases to be solipsistic only up close"

Phenomenology:

Rules for Students

Operational Rules