Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2019
Though singularity of the self can be understood in different ways, this essay argues that it oug... more Though singularity of the self can be understood in different ways, this essay argues that it ought ultimately to be understood temporally, in terms of becoming and the establishment of what Merleau-Ponty calls «personal institutions». Anorexia is used as a case study: anorexics can oscillate between (a) feeling themselves expressed in their anorexic desires, and (b) feeling themselves expressed in their opposition to anorexic desires. I argue, drawing upon Laing's understanding of psychopathology, that neither is their «true singular self» but that singularity ultimately realizes itself in the process of this oscillation. Guided by Merleau-Ponty's concept of «institution», I propose that oscillations result from lived efforts to resolve indeterminately felt existential problems; that the repetitions and «binary rhythm» involved in such oscillations are endemic to personal becoming; and that what enables success rather than failure in such becoming singular are relations with others who act in recognition of this process.
Citation: “Singularity as Becoming Oneself through Others: Lessons from Merleau-Ponty, Laing, and Anorexia” eds. Stefan Kristensen and Till Grohman., special issue on Self and Singularity, Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 7 (2019): 37-73.
Walls to Bridges is a pedagogical model that brings together incarcerated people and university s... more Walls to Bridges is a pedagogical model that brings together incarcerated people and university students to have a semester-long university course within a prison. In this chapter, I consider what, within this pedagogical model allows for the development of a community of inquiry and an experience of profound education, even within the rather charged context of a correctional institution and even given the various inequalities and other ‘walls’ existing between students. By reflecting upon how different forms of walls are overcome by this pedagogical paradigm, and inequalities are transformed into resources rather than hindrances, I think we can learn even about the conditions of education in courses that are not especially marked by inequalities but that nonetheless are characterised by students being largely ‘walled off’ from each other. Such ‘walls’, I will suggest, are inclined to form in most classes, at least in North America.
The chapter draws upon the notion of dialectic suggested by Plato’s Socrates, the idea of seriality developed by Sartre, and the insights of students of Walls to Bridges classes.
Citation: “From Walls to Bridges: Education as Dialectic and the Educator as Curator of the Affective Conditions of Dialogue” in _Teaching in Unequal Societies_, edited by John Russon, Siby K George and Pravesh Jung. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, (2020): 122-149.
“To consent to love or be loved,” said Merleau-Ponty, “is to consent also to influence someone el... more “To consent to love or be loved,” said Merleau-Ponty, “is to consent also to influence someone else, to decide to a certain extent on behalf of the other.” This essay explicates that idea through a meditation on intimacy. I propose, first, that, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, we are always transgressing into each other’s experience, whether we are strangers or familiars; I call this “ontological intimacy.” Concrete experiences of intimacy are based upon this ontological intimacy, and can take place at two levels: (1) at-this-moment (such that we can experience intimacy even with strangers, by sharing a momentary but extra-ordinary mutual recognition) and (2) in shared interpersonal institutions, or habitual, enduring, and co-enacted visions of who we are, how to live, and what matters. Through particular examples of dynamics within these layers of intimacy (drawing upon work by Berne and by Russon), I claim that we are always, inevitably, imposing an “unfreedom” upon our intimate others. Freedom, then, can only develop from within and by virtue of this “unfreedom.” Thus, what distinguishes empowering or emancipating relationships from oppressive ones is not the removal of transgressive normative social forces; it is rather the particular character of those transgressive forces. Some transgressions upon others’ experience—some forms of “unfreedom”—will tend to promote freedom; others will tend to hinder it. This amounts to a call for promoting agency and freedom not only through critical analysis of public institutions, practices and discourses, but also through critical insight into and transformation of our most private and intimate relationships.
[click on url link to access online article: http://rdcu.be/ubjo ]
In this essay, I propose that... more [click on url link to access online article: http://rdcu.be/ubjo ]
In this essay, I propose that human development is the emergence of something significantly new out of a past situation that does not hold that novel achievement as a determinate potential except retrospectively. Development, in other words, might best be understood as a “realization” in the sense of a making-real of some new form of being that had no prior place in reality, that was not programmed in advance, but that once realized can have its roots traced back to determinate conditions and potentials in its own past. This amounts to a rethinking of the nature of developmental potential as retrospectively determined. But it also involves a reconception of the locus of such potential: I argue that developmental potential must be understood as located in the human-organism-in-its-situation, rather than simply in the human organism. I take my bearings from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I make my case by elucidating three different forms of human development described by Merleau-Ponty: intellectual realizations of insight; the realization of a new perceptual-motor skill; and a child’s realization of a new lived way of making sense of the interpersonal world.
Maclaren, Kym. “Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of ‘Letting Others Be’.” Ch... more Maclaren, Kym. “Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of ‘Letting Others Be’.” Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought 4 (2002): 187-210.
Forthcoming in _The Development of Perception in Merleau-Ponty_, edited by John Russon and Kirsten Jacobson. University of Toronto Press.
In the _Phenomenology of Perception_, Merleau-Ponty claims that “passionate feelings and behavior... more In the _Phenomenology of Perception_, Merleau-Ponty claims that “passionate feelings and behaviors are… in fact institutions.” My aim in this essay is, drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s mid-career writings, including the lectures on institution, to bring out the full force of this claim. My focus is on the more personal side of institutions—that is to say, transformational moments within our personal and intersubjective lives where a new configuration of meaning and a new form of agency is inaugurated—and on what Merleau-Ponty calls the “subterranean logic” of this development. The development involved is “subterranean,” as we will see, insofar as these transformational moments come in some sense from beyond the subject and are not simply the result of the subject’s own constitutive powers. The notion of institution is thus yet another way in which Merleau-Ponty seeks to criticize and offer an alternative to intellectualism, with its idea of a constituting subject.
Based upon experiences in Inside-Out Prison Exchange courses, and drawing insights from Plato, Me... more Based upon experiences in Inside-Out Prison Exchange courses, and drawing insights from Plato, Merleau-Ponty, and Freire, I reflect upon the pedagogical power of honest expressions of personal experience, and dialogical inquiry. The expression of personal experiences, I argue, can (a) motivate a “conversion” from a sophistic and disputatious use of reason to the transformative practice of pursuing one’s own insights and interrogating tensions therein and (b) institute genuine solidarity among inquirers in place of alienation. Dialogue in this context becomes a “practice of freedom”: It cultivates in us virtues necessary for learning and transforms us into socially responsible agents of inquiry.
This is the Introduction to a Special Issue of _Emotion, Space and Society_ on Intimacy and Embod... more This is the Introduction to a Special Issue of _Emotion, Space and Society_ on Intimacy and Embodiment: Phenomenological Perspectives. Contributions to the Special Issue are by Jonathan Cole, John Russon, Eva-Maria Simms, Kirsten Jacobson, Florentien Verhage, David Ciavatta, Peter Costello, Stefan Kristensen, Kym Maclaren, and a visual essay by conceptual artist Luis Jacob.
For the sake of introducing this Special Issue, this introduction outlines the special contribution that phenomenology and its notion of embodiment can make to understanding intimacy; it lays out some of the key resources on which phenomenological accounts draw in order to understand intimacy; and it proposes that intimacy must be understood as conditioned by our embodiment and as a process of significant others becoming a part of our embodiment by virtue of informing the very way the world reveals itself and the meaning we find therein. The introduction ends with a summary of the contributions to this issue, noting that their diverse elucidations of intimacies through the notion of embodiment lead as a whole to a revelation of the central place of intimacy in self-transformation and our becoming individuals.
Touch is, I propose, a foundational, intercorporeal form of intimacy. Such intercorporeal intima... more Touch is, I propose, a foundational, intercorporeal form of intimacy. Such intercorporeal intimacy precedes developmentally and undergirds permanently the intersubjective intimacy that is possible between adult subjects. For, it is in the affective intimacy of touching and being touched that we first realize (i.e., make real, actualize) both a coexistence or participation with other bodies, and an organization and differentiation of ourselves as embodied beings. Section 1 lays out phenomena of interpersonal (and interanimal) relations that require thinking touch as much more than either the exploration of a physical surface by an embodied subject or a conventional form of communication: I note the powerful existential effects of being or not being touched. In section 2, I recall philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, focusing on features that provide resources for understanding touch. I argue that touching must be understood as potentially transformative of the toucher, that being touched can equally be transformative, and that touching and being touched are inherently intertwined. This intertwining and transformative power is what makes touch an intercorporeal form of intimacy and accounts for its ability to inaugurate and enliven, at the affective level, our sense of self as differentiated from and in relation to others.
Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose... more Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant’s initial sense of self is still indeterminate and ambiguous, and is only progressively consolidated, beginning with embodied perceptions of others. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition, and with reference to empirical studies in developmental psychology, I argue that perceiving other persons is significantly different from perceiving inanimate things. Until sufficient motor capacities have developed for exploring and perceptually disambiguating inanimate things, it is only in perceiving others who recognize her that the infant is able to realize herself as a self. As the physiological and behavioural evidence suggests, whereas inanimate things initially captivate and dispossess the young infant, other people return her to herself. This paper lends support to the ideas that humans are ontologically social beings, and that selfhood is socially conditioned rather than given with consciousness.
This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon MerleauPonty's
conceptions of embodi... more This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon MerleauPonty's conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world, and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings.
Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw... more Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw material reshaped by rational practices, or it merely motivates intellectual reasoning. Drawing upon the philosophy of Hegel and Plato’s Socrates, I argue, however, that education is a process of existential transformation, and therein, that emotion plays an essential, internal role. Through an analysis of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, I argue that emotions have their own logic, and that an individual can be propelled to increasingly rational emotional stances (her emotions can be educated) by the demands of the emotional situation itself, in the absence of any intellectual reasoning or rational training. Appealing also to the structure and content of Socrates’ conversations, I argue that intellectual reasoning can lead to self-overcoming only insofar as it involves a particular emotional orientation towards the emotional challenges of genuine learning—insofar as it is “conscientious reasoning.”
Emotion has often been conceived, both within philosophy and without, as a force that opposes its... more Emotion has often been conceived, both within philosophy and without, as a force that opposes itself to reason and, correspondingly, to one’s autonomy. This impression that emotion is irrational and at odds with autonomy is, I contend, based upon traditional and problematic conceptions of what it is to be a self or subject, the agent of one’s actions. One such problematic conception, still very much operative these days (if not in our philosophical treatises, then often in our practical lives), is the moralistic conception of a subject as inherently rational, and as actualizing her own autonomy through answering to her own rationality. From this perspective, when someone becomes “emotional” and behaves in ways that, from an external perspective, appear inappropriate to the situation at hand, we tend to suppose that this person is “losing control of herself,” giving up on a rational way of considering the situation, and indulging in her irrational emotional impulses. She has, we might say, chosen to indulge herself in her emotions, and thus freely relinquished her own freedom. She is therefore fundamentally at fault for her behaviour. This essay offers a criticism of this moralistic conception of agency and selfhood, and it does so through a consideration of emotion and the emotional metamorphoses that we can undergo—either towards increasingly compulsive, “mad” ways of being, or towards new epiphanies and a new sense of oneself and one’s place in the world. Relying upon an existential understanding of the “subject as agent” as an achievement, or what one becomes, rather than as a pre-given, always present entity, I argue that emotion is not opposed to reason, but is rather an essential element of our rational development towards autonomous ways of being. The moralistic conception of the subject, on this account, is wrong to think that a person’s emotional behaviour is simply her own fault, as if she had allowed herself to fall away from a rationality to which she has access; it mistakenly presupposes a fully developed rational self, and simultaneously fails to recognize the essential role that others play in a person’s emotional metamorphoses. As a result, the moralistic conception of the subject can, I suggest, be oppressive and destructive, actually helping to bring about “mad” and compulsive behaviour, instead of inspiring a greater rationality, as it hopes to do. To make these claims, I draw on the phenomenological tradition of philosophy, and especially on the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
“Assembling some of the most important Merleau-Ponty scholars working today, Time, Memory, Instit... more “Assembling some of the most important Merleau-Ponty scholars working today, Time, Memory, Institution may be the most important volume on Merleau-Ponty published in many, many years.” Leonard Lawlor, author of Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy
“The rich and impressive essays in Time, Memory, Institution make a new and significant contribution to the field, dealing with works of Merleau-Ponty’s that have only recently become available in English.” Jack Reynolds, author of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity
This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole as well as the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such, but is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself.
Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy.
This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty.
Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels
Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2019
Though singularity of the self can be understood in different ways, this essay argues that it oug... more Though singularity of the self can be understood in different ways, this essay argues that it ought ultimately to be understood temporally, in terms of becoming and the establishment of what Merleau-Ponty calls «personal institutions». Anorexia is used as a case study: anorexics can oscillate between (a) feeling themselves expressed in their anorexic desires, and (b) feeling themselves expressed in their opposition to anorexic desires. I argue, drawing upon Laing's understanding of psychopathology, that neither is their «true singular self» but that singularity ultimately realizes itself in the process of this oscillation. Guided by Merleau-Ponty's concept of «institution», I propose that oscillations result from lived efforts to resolve indeterminately felt existential problems; that the repetitions and «binary rhythm» involved in such oscillations are endemic to personal becoming; and that what enables success rather than failure in such becoming singular are relations with others who act in recognition of this process.
Citation: “Singularity as Becoming Oneself through Others: Lessons from Merleau-Ponty, Laing, and Anorexia” eds. Stefan Kristensen and Till Grohman., special issue on Self and Singularity, Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 7 (2019): 37-73.
Walls to Bridges is a pedagogical model that brings together incarcerated people and university s... more Walls to Bridges is a pedagogical model that brings together incarcerated people and university students to have a semester-long university course within a prison. In this chapter, I consider what, within this pedagogical model allows for the development of a community of inquiry and an experience of profound education, even within the rather charged context of a correctional institution and even given the various inequalities and other ‘walls’ existing between students. By reflecting upon how different forms of walls are overcome by this pedagogical paradigm, and inequalities are transformed into resources rather than hindrances, I think we can learn even about the conditions of education in courses that are not especially marked by inequalities but that nonetheless are characterised by students being largely ‘walled off’ from each other. Such ‘walls’, I will suggest, are inclined to form in most classes, at least in North America.
The chapter draws upon the notion of dialectic suggested by Plato’s Socrates, the idea of seriality developed by Sartre, and the insights of students of Walls to Bridges classes.
Citation: “From Walls to Bridges: Education as Dialectic and the Educator as Curator of the Affective Conditions of Dialogue” in _Teaching in Unequal Societies_, edited by John Russon, Siby K George and Pravesh Jung. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, (2020): 122-149.
“To consent to love or be loved,” said Merleau-Ponty, “is to consent also to influence someone el... more “To consent to love or be loved,” said Merleau-Ponty, “is to consent also to influence someone else, to decide to a certain extent on behalf of the other.” This essay explicates that idea through a meditation on intimacy. I propose, first, that, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, we are always transgressing into each other’s experience, whether we are strangers or familiars; I call this “ontological intimacy.” Concrete experiences of intimacy are based upon this ontological intimacy, and can take place at two levels: (1) at-this-moment (such that we can experience intimacy even with strangers, by sharing a momentary but extra-ordinary mutual recognition) and (2) in shared interpersonal institutions, or habitual, enduring, and co-enacted visions of who we are, how to live, and what matters. Through particular examples of dynamics within these layers of intimacy (drawing upon work by Berne and by Russon), I claim that we are always, inevitably, imposing an “unfreedom” upon our intimate others. Freedom, then, can only develop from within and by virtue of this “unfreedom.” Thus, what distinguishes empowering or emancipating relationships from oppressive ones is not the removal of transgressive normative social forces; it is rather the particular character of those transgressive forces. Some transgressions upon others’ experience—some forms of “unfreedom”—will tend to promote freedom; others will tend to hinder it. This amounts to a call for promoting agency and freedom not only through critical analysis of public institutions, practices and discourses, but also through critical insight into and transformation of our most private and intimate relationships.
[click on url link to access online article: http://rdcu.be/ubjo ]
In this essay, I propose that... more [click on url link to access online article: http://rdcu.be/ubjo ]
In this essay, I propose that human development is the emergence of something significantly new out of a past situation that does not hold that novel achievement as a determinate potential except retrospectively. Development, in other words, might best be understood as a “realization” in the sense of a making-real of some new form of being that had no prior place in reality, that was not programmed in advance, but that once realized can have its roots traced back to determinate conditions and potentials in its own past. This amounts to a rethinking of the nature of developmental potential as retrospectively determined. But it also involves a reconception of the locus of such potential: I argue that developmental potential must be understood as located in the human-organism-in-its-situation, rather than simply in the human organism. I take my bearings from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I make my case by elucidating three different forms of human development described by Merleau-Ponty: intellectual realizations of insight; the realization of a new perceptual-motor skill; and a child’s realization of a new lived way of making sense of the interpersonal world.
Maclaren, Kym. “Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of ‘Letting Others Be’.” Ch... more Maclaren, Kym. “Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of ‘Letting Others Be’.” Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought 4 (2002): 187-210.
Forthcoming in _The Development of Perception in Merleau-Ponty_, edited by John Russon and Kirsten Jacobson. University of Toronto Press.
In the _Phenomenology of Perception_, Merleau-Ponty claims that “passionate feelings and behavior... more In the _Phenomenology of Perception_, Merleau-Ponty claims that “passionate feelings and behaviors are… in fact institutions.” My aim in this essay is, drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s mid-career writings, including the lectures on institution, to bring out the full force of this claim. My focus is on the more personal side of institutions—that is to say, transformational moments within our personal and intersubjective lives where a new configuration of meaning and a new form of agency is inaugurated—and on what Merleau-Ponty calls the “subterranean logic” of this development. The development involved is “subterranean,” as we will see, insofar as these transformational moments come in some sense from beyond the subject and are not simply the result of the subject’s own constitutive powers. The notion of institution is thus yet another way in which Merleau-Ponty seeks to criticize and offer an alternative to intellectualism, with its idea of a constituting subject.
Based upon experiences in Inside-Out Prison Exchange courses, and drawing insights from Plato, Me... more Based upon experiences in Inside-Out Prison Exchange courses, and drawing insights from Plato, Merleau-Ponty, and Freire, I reflect upon the pedagogical power of honest expressions of personal experience, and dialogical inquiry. The expression of personal experiences, I argue, can (a) motivate a “conversion” from a sophistic and disputatious use of reason to the transformative practice of pursuing one’s own insights and interrogating tensions therein and (b) institute genuine solidarity among inquirers in place of alienation. Dialogue in this context becomes a “practice of freedom”: It cultivates in us virtues necessary for learning and transforms us into socially responsible agents of inquiry.
This is the Introduction to a Special Issue of _Emotion, Space and Society_ on Intimacy and Embod... more This is the Introduction to a Special Issue of _Emotion, Space and Society_ on Intimacy and Embodiment: Phenomenological Perspectives. Contributions to the Special Issue are by Jonathan Cole, John Russon, Eva-Maria Simms, Kirsten Jacobson, Florentien Verhage, David Ciavatta, Peter Costello, Stefan Kristensen, Kym Maclaren, and a visual essay by conceptual artist Luis Jacob.
For the sake of introducing this Special Issue, this introduction outlines the special contribution that phenomenology and its notion of embodiment can make to understanding intimacy; it lays out some of the key resources on which phenomenological accounts draw in order to understand intimacy; and it proposes that intimacy must be understood as conditioned by our embodiment and as a process of significant others becoming a part of our embodiment by virtue of informing the very way the world reveals itself and the meaning we find therein. The introduction ends with a summary of the contributions to this issue, noting that their diverse elucidations of intimacies through the notion of embodiment lead as a whole to a revelation of the central place of intimacy in self-transformation and our becoming individuals.
Touch is, I propose, a foundational, intercorporeal form of intimacy. Such intercorporeal intima... more Touch is, I propose, a foundational, intercorporeal form of intimacy. Such intercorporeal intimacy precedes developmentally and undergirds permanently the intersubjective intimacy that is possible between adult subjects. For, it is in the affective intimacy of touching and being touched that we first realize (i.e., make real, actualize) both a coexistence or participation with other bodies, and an organization and differentiation of ourselves as embodied beings. Section 1 lays out phenomena of interpersonal (and interanimal) relations that require thinking touch as much more than either the exploration of a physical surface by an embodied subject or a conventional form of communication: I note the powerful existential effects of being or not being touched. In section 2, I recall philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, focusing on features that provide resources for understanding touch. I argue that touching must be understood as potentially transformative of the toucher, that being touched can equally be transformative, and that touching and being touched are inherently intertwined. This intertwining and transformative power is what makes touch an intercorporeal form of intimacy and accounts for its ability to inaugurate and enliven, at the affective level, our sense of self as differentiated from and in relation to others.
Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose... more Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant’s initial sense of self is still indeterminate and ambiguous, and is only progressively consolidated, beginning with embodied perceptions of others. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition, and with reference to empirical studies in developmental psychology, I argue that perceiving other persons is significantly different from perceiving inanimate things. Until sufficient motor capacities have developed for exploring and perceptually disambiguating inanimate things, it is only in perceiving others who recognize her that the infant is able to realize herself as a self. As the physiological and behavioural evidence suggests, whereas inanimate things initially captivate and dispossess the young infant, other people return her to herself. This paper lends support to the ideas that humans are ontologically social beings, and that selfhood is socially conditioned rather than given with consciousness.
This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon MerleauPonty's
conceptions of embodi... more This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon MerleauPonty's conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world, and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings.
Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw... more Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw material reshaped by rational practices, or it merely motivates intellectual reasoning. Drawing upon the philosophy of Hegel and Plato’s Socrates, I argue, however, that education is a process of existential transformation, and therein, that emotion plays an essential, internal role. Through an analysis of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, I argue that emotions have their own logic, and that an individual can be propelled to increasingly rational emotional stances (her emotions can be educated) by the demands of the emotional situation itself, in the absence of any intellectual reasoning or rational training. Appealing also to the structure and content of Socrates’ conversations, I argue that intellectual reasoning can lead to self-overcoming only insofar as it involves a particular emotional orientation towards the emotional challenges of genuine learning—insofar as it is “conscientious reasoning.”
Emotion has often been conceived, both within philosophy and without, as a force that opposes its... more Emotion has often been conceived, both within philosophy and without, as a force that opposes itself to reason and, correspondingly, to one’s autonomy. This impression that emotion is irrational and at odds with autonomy is, I contend, based upon traditional and problematic conceptions of what it is to be a self or subject, the agent of one’s actions. One such problematic conception, still very much operative these days (if not in our philosophical treatises, then often in our practical lives), is the moralistic conception of a subject as inherently rational, and as actualizing her own autonomy through answering to her own rationality. From this perspective, when someone becomes “emotional” and behaves in ways that, from an external perspective, appear inappropriate to the situation at hand, we tend to suppose that this person is “losing control of herself,” giving up on a rational way of considering the situation, and indulging in her irrational emotional impulses. She has, we might say, chosen to indulge herself in her emotions, and thus freely relinquished her own freedom. She is therefore fundamentally at fault for her behaviour. This essay offers a criticism of this moralistic conception of agency and selfhood, and it does so through a consideration of emotion and the emotional metamorphoses that we can undergo—either towards increasingly compulsive, “mad” ways of being, or towards new epiphanies and a new sense of oneself and one’s place in the world. Relying upon an existential understanding of the “subject as agent” as an achievement, or what one becomes, rather than as a pre-given, always present entity, I argue that emotion is not opposed to reason, but is rather an essential element of our rational development towards autonomous ways of being. The moralistic conception of the subject, on this account, is wrong to think that a person’s emotional behaviour is simply her own fault, as if she had allowed herself to fall away from a rationality to which she has access; it mistakenly presupposes a fully developed rational self, and simultaneously fails to recognize the essential role that others play in a person’s emotional metamorphoses. As a result, the moralistic conception of the subject can, I suggest, be oppressive and destructive, actually helping to bring about “mad” and compulsive behaviour, instead of inspiring a greater rationality, as it hopes to do. To make these claims, I draw on the phenomenological tradition of philosophy, and especially on the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
“Assembling some of the most important Merleau-Ponty scholars working today, Time, Memory, Instit... more “Assembling some of the most important Merleau-Ponty scholars working today, Time, Memory, Institution may be the most important volume on Merleau-Ponty published in many, many years.” Leonard Lawlor, author of Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy
“The rich and impressive essays in Time, Memory, Institution make a new and significant contribution to the field, dealing with works of Merleau-Ponty’s that have only recently become available in English.” Jack Reynolds, author of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity
This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole as well as the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such, but is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself.
Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy.
This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty.
Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels
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Papers by Kym Maclaren
Citation: “Singularity as Becoming Oneself through Others: Lessons from Merleau-Ponty, Laing, and Anorexia” eds. Stefan Kristensen and Till Grohman., special issue on Self and Singularity, Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 7 (2019): 37-73.
The chapter draws upon the notion of dialectic suggested by Plato’s Socrates, the idea of seriality developed by Sartre, and the insights of students of Walls to Bridges classes.
Citation: “From Walls to Bridges: Education as Dialectic and the Educator as Curator of the Affective Conditions of Dialogue” in _Teaching in Unequal Societies_, edited by John Russon, Siby K George and Pravesh Jung. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, (2020): 122-149.
In this essay, I propose that human development is the emergence of something significantly new out of a past situation that does not hold that novel achievement as a determinate potential except retrospectively. Development, in other words, might best be understood as a “realization” in the sense of a making-real of some new form of being that had no prior place in reality, that was not programmed in advance, but that once realized can have its roots traced back to determinate conditions and potentials in its own past. This amounts to a rethinking of the nature of developmental potential as retrospectively determined. But it also involves a reconception of the locus of such potential: I argue that developmental potential must be understood as located in the human-organism-in-its-situation, rather than simply in the human organism. I take my bearings from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I make my case by elucidating three different forms of human development described by Merleau-Ponty: intellectual realizations of insight; the realization of a new perceptual-motor skill; and a child’s realization of a new lived way of making sense of the interpersonal world.
My aim in this essay is, drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s mid-career writings, including the lectures on institution, to bring out the full force of this claim. My focus is on the more personal side of institutions—that is to say, transformational moments within our personal and intersubjective lives where a new configuration of meaning and a new form of agency is inaugurated—and on what Merleau-Ponty calls the “subterranean logic” of this development. The development involved is “subterranean,” as we will see, insofar as these transformational moments come in some sense from beyond the subject and are not simply the result of the subject’s own constitutive powers. The notion of institution is thus yet another way in which Merleau-Ponty seeks to criticize and offer an alternative to intellectualism, with its idea of a constituting subject.
For the sake of introducing this Special Issue, this introduction outlines the special contribution that phenomenology and its notion of embodiment can make to understanding intimacy; it lays out some of the key resources on which phenomenological accounts draw in order to understand intimacy; and it proposes that intimacy must be understood as conditioned by our embodiment and as a process of significant others becoming a part of our embodiment by virtue of informing the very way the world reveals itself and the meaning we find therein. The introduction ends with a summary of the contributions to this issue, noting that their diverse elucidations of intimacies through the notion of embodiment lead as a whole to a revelation of the central place of intimacy in self-transformation and our becoming individuals.
Table of Contents can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/17554586/13/supp/C
If you'd like a copy, please email me: [email protected]
conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of
cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that
there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of
emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world,
and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings.
This essay offers a criticism of this moralistic conception of agency and selfhood, and it does so through a consideration of emotion and the emotional metamorphoses that we can undergo—either towards increasingly compulsive, “mad” ways of being, or towards new epiphanies and a new sense of oneself and one’s place in the world. Relying upon an existential understanding of the “subject as agent” as an achievement, or what one becomes, rather than as a pre-given, always present entity, I argue that emotion is not opposed to reason, but is rather an essential element of our rational development towards autonomous ways of being. The moralistic conception of the subject, on this account, is wrong to think that a person’s emotional behaviour is simply her own fault, as if she had allowed herself to fall away from a rationality to which she has access; it mistakenly presupposes a fully developed rational self, and simultaneously fails to recognize the essential role that others play in a person’s emotional metamorphoses. As a result, the moralistic conception of the subject can, I suggest, be oppressive and destructive, actually helping to bring about “mad” and compulsive behaviour, instead of inspiring a greater rationality, as it hopes to do.
To make these claims, I draw on the phenomenological tradition of philosophy, and especially on the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Books by Kym Maclaren
“The rich and impressive essays in Time, Memory, Institution make a new and significant contribution to the field, dealing with works of Merleau-Ponty’s that have only recently become available in English.” Jack Reynolds, author of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity
This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole as well as the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such, but is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself.
Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy.
This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty.
Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels
Citation: “Singularity as Becoming Oneself through Others: Lessons from Merleau-Ponty, Laing, and Anorexia” eds. Stefan Kristensen and Till Grohman., special issue on Self and Singularity, Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 7 (2019): 37-73.
The chapter draws upon the notion of dialectic suggested by Plato’s Socrates, the idea of seriality developed by Sartre, and the insights of students of Walls to Bridges classes.
Citation: “From Walls to Bridges: Education as Dialectic and the Educator as Curator of the Affective Conditions of Dialogue” in _Teaching in Unequal Societies_, edited by John Russon, Siby K George and Pravesh Jung. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, (2020): 122-149.
In this essay, I propose that human development is the emergence of something significantly new out of a past situation that does not hold that novel achievement as a determinate potential except retrospectively. Development, in other words, might best be understood as a “realization” in the sense of a making-real of some new form of being that had no prior place in reality, that was not programmed in advance, but that once realized can have its roots traced back to determinate conditions and potentials in its own past. This amounts to a rethinking of the nature of developmental potential as retrospectively determined. But it also involves a reconception of the locus of such potential: I argue that developmental potential must be understood as located in the human-organism-in-its-situation, rather than simply in the human organism. I take my bearings from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I make my case by elucidating three different forms of human development described by Merleau-Ponty: intellectual realizations of insight; the realization of a new perceptual-motor skill; and a child’s realization of a new lived way of making sense of the interpersonal world.
My aim in this essay is, drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s mid-career writings, including the lectures on institution, to bring out the full force of this claim. My focus is on the more personal side of institutions—that is to say, transformational moments within our personal and intersubjective lives where a new configuration of meaning and a new form of agency is inaugurated—and on what Merleau-Ponty calls the “subterranean logic” of this development. The development involved is “subterranean,” as we will see, insofar as these transformational moments come in some sense from beyond the subject and are not simply the result of the subject’s own constitutive powers. The notion of institution is thus yet another way in which Merleau-Ponty seeks to criticize and offer an alternative to intellectualism, with its idea of a constituting subject.
For the sake of introducing this Special Issue, this introduction outlines the special contribution that phenomenology and its notion of embodiment can make to understanding intimacy; it lays out some of the key resources on which phenomenological accounts draw in order to understand intimacy; and it proposes that intimacy must be understood as conditioned by our embodiment and as a process of significant others becoming a part of our embodiment by virtue of informing the very way the world reveals itself and the meaning we find therein. The introduction ends with a summary of the contributions to this issue, noting that their diverse elucidations of intimacies through the notion of embodiment lead as a whole to a revelation of the central place of intimacy in self-transformation and our becoming individuals.
Table of Contents can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/17554586/13/supp/C
If you'd like a copy, please email me: [email protected]
conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of
cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that
there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of
emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world,
and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings.
This essay offers a criticism of this moralistic conception of agency and selfhood, and it does so through a consideration of emotion and the emotional metamorphoses that we can undergo—either towards increasingly compulsive, “mad” ways of being, or towards new epiphanies and a new sense of oneself and one’s place in the world. Relying upon an existential understanding of the “subject as agent” as an achievement, or what one becomes, rather than as a pre-given, always present entity, I argue that emotion is not opposed to reason, but is rather an essential element of our rational development towards autonomous ways of being. The moralistic conception of the subject, on this account, is wrong to think that a person’s emotional behaviour is simply her own fault, as if she had allowed herself to fall away from a rationality to which she has access; it mistakenly presupposes a fully developed rational self, and simultaneously fails to recognize the essential role that others play in a person’s emotional metamorphoses. As a result, the moralistic conception of the subject can, I suggest, be oppressive and destructive, actually helping to bring about “mad” and compulsive behaviour, instead of inspiring a greater rationality, as it hopes to do.
To make these claims, I draw on the phenomenological tradition of philosophy, and especially on the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
“The rich and impressive essays in Time, Memory, Institution make a new and significant contribution to the field, dealing with works of Merleau-Ponty’s that have only recently become available in English.” Jack Reynolds, author of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity
This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole as well as the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such, but is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself.
Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy.
This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty.
Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels