Henri Bergson

corps-sujet

L’œil ne voit que ce que l’esprit est prêt à comprendre.

Umas palestras originalmente para o meio do rádio, muito simples, concisas e claras, mas também rasas, talvez direcionadas a um público muito distante, acostumado com generalizações grosseiras como "a ciência é tudo", "as coisas são fixas", "a percepção leva à ilusão", "temos de ter certeza sobre as coisas" etc, que então precisam ser combatidas com um não é assim, mas que também não é elaborado suficientemente, e dá suspeitas de exageros contrários. ( )

If only all philosophers had a text like this; MMP introduces himself and his thought very well in this series of lectures. I knew almost nothing about him going in, and now I feel ready to think through his harder works. Very readable!

The introduction was excellent, as well, despite the unpromising "summary of each lecture" format. Baldwin is sympathetic, but he also isn't afraid to point out MMP's failures, whether of factual understanding (his grasp of physics doesn't seem to have been particularly good) or reasoning (you can't analyze painting, music and literature in the same terms).

As for the thought itself, MMP seems to me to be a left-wing Heidegger variation. He is critical of 'science', which means something like analytical thought materialism, and insists that human experience can only be properly explained if we give attention to 'perceptual' life (hence the title). Perception turns out to be very broad: looking at tables, yes, but also intersubjectivity, stimmung, and so on. He's usually reasonable--making a plea to include 'perception' in our understanding of human experience, rather than insisting that *all* human experience is non-cognitive. But sometimes he seems to lean too far in that direction, suggesting that "naive" experience is opposed to intellectual experience altogether, rather than insisting, rightly, that all experience is both intellectual and bodily. In Kantian cant, he is content to admit the existence and necessity of regulative ideas; he just doesn't think we should fool ourselves into thinking that those ideas are anything other than regulative, nor that they are sufficient for understanding.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see him applying all this to a specific time period: he is writing, he says, about a particularly modern way of understanding. But here we run up against philosophy's usual issue: on the one hand, MMP wants to laud the emergence of a new way of understanding (roughly, a more holistic and less 'classical' way) in modernity. On the other hand, he can't help himself, and insists that "modern consciousness has not discovered a modern truth but rather a truth of all time which is simply more visible--supremely acute--in today's world." So... if it's a truth of all time, why was it so unacknowledged until now? If we can come to understand this consciousness differently, why can't the consciousness itself be liable to change?

He also gets a bit carried away in a very French philosophical way (classical painting kills the "trembling life" of the world; Chinese (sic) rock gardens express "a preference for death"; art is always the attempt to create a self-sufficient object), but certainly isn't the worst offender in this regard.

Anyway, I look forward to learning more about MMP; anyone who can be this clear and interesting in such a restricted format can surely be interesting in more professional texts. And I do suspect that he'll tell me what I want to hear, things like this:

"To look at human beings from the outside is what makes the mind self-critical and keeps it sane. But the aim should not be to suggest that all is absurd, as Voltaire did. It is much more a question of implying, as Kafka does, that human life is always under threat and of using humour to prepare the ground for those rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognise, to find, one another."

Reason, he tells us, is waiting for us; we'll never inherit it, but nor will we give up on it. Has anyone compared MMP with Adorno? That would be fruitful, I think. ( )

"To love reason...-to crave the eternal when we are beginning to know ever more about the reality of our time, to want the clearest concept when the thing itself is ambiguous--this is to prefer the word 'reason' to the exercise of reason. To restore [the Cartesian ideal] is never to reestablish; it is to mask." (82, and I don't doubt that the last sentence sounds much better in French).

Of course there's a lot of good here. It's short, first of all (especially compared to The Phenomenology of Perception), very, very clear (e.g., "We can no longer draw an absolute distinction between space and the things which occupy it"), and the introduction, by Thomas Baldwin (who edited the Basic Writings (Routledge, 2003) of Merleau-Ponty), is suitably impatient with MMP's lapses (e.g., MMP's exaggeration of the independence of works of art from referentiality). (The introduction, however, should not have omitted MMP's troublesome Humanism and Terror from its summary of his career).

Of course I can praise MMP for phenomenology itself. I'm glad to see pretensions of mastery confounded and a community of bodied selves replace the doubting individuals of Descartes. It is even at times a world that calls us into self-consciousness (65), where the world conditions us ("Humanity is invested in the things of the world and these are invested in it"). It also includes a chapter on "animal life" that argues that we should "live alongside the world of animals instead of rashly denying it any kind of interiority" and speaks against "project[ing] onto animals the principal characteristics of human existence." Yet it flits away from these insights almost as soon as they're made.

The world it considers is a world primarily of objects, encountered from our individual, always shifting vantage points, and it is, above all, a world of other people. But its phenomenology is strangely unerotic, and throughout anthropocentric: it spreads the human out, but leaves it intact; and where I expected a bodied self in ecstatic motion in/with the world and other self-objects, I found a subject considering, and considering its considering. Let's blame existentialism for MMP's choice to discuss the bodiment of anger (instead of love, or eating) and for his references to the burden of being called to action in a "world which excludes neither fissures nor lacunae." But let's also blame "perception" itself, which doesn't consider enough what happens when the world looks back at us, when it touches us, when we discover ourselves in it rather than (just) perceiving it, when it ceases to be an it. ( )