Thursday, May 27, 2010

A passage from Husserl

About the difference between the body and other things, Husserl writes;

[W]hereas, with regard to all other things, I have the freedom to change at will my position in relation to them and thereby at the same time vary at will the manifolds of appearance in which they come to givenness for me, on the other hand I do not have the possibility of distancing myself from my Body, or my Body from me, and accordingly the manifolds of appearance of the Body are restricted in a definite way.....The same body which serves me as means for all my perception obstructs me in the perception of it itself and is a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing.
[Husserl, E (1952/1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Dordrecht: Kluwer. p.167]

As he writes, I cannot percept my own body in a perfect way. I cannot see my head, back or eyes. The appearance of my body does not have an unity like other objects. However, I still know that my body is in unity. The unity of my body cannot be recognized through perception, but is lived directly through action.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

recognition before thinking

Impressive passage by Henri Bergson;

In fact, we commonly act our recognition before we think it. Our daily life is spent among objects whose very presence invites us to play a part: in this the familiarity of their aspect consists. Motor tendencies would, then, be enough by themselves to give us the feeling of recognition.
[Bergson, H. (1896/1991). Matter and Memory trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone. p.95]

A cup affords us to hold it and drink the coffee in it, a chair affords us to sit down on it, a computer affords us to write an article. All the surrounding objects invites us to act in certain ways. We recognize the objects through our motor capacity. Recognition is not a representation in the mind, but is lived through embodied action.