While reading Ponty, his thoughts on human relation to the world and different beings in the world really struck me. One part in particular was “I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains, for I alone bring into being for myself (and there fore into being in the only sense that the word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry one, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished--since that distance is not one of its properties--if I were not there to can it with my gaze.” (pg. 277). This quote caught my attention and got me thinking because it is a different idea from what we have read by Emerson, for example. In nature, Emerson bring forth the idea of man and nature and is supplying the different examples of nature through the seven chapter thats he writes. This quote from Maurice Merleay-Ponty, on the other, is stating that our physical and social environment are nothing until we bring being of our own self to it; we are what makes the being around us. I really liked this idea of human interaction with nature because it is so different from the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau who believe that nature contributes so much to our lives and upon our interaction with nature can define the meaning of living. It was, however, hard for me to wrap my idea around the fact that the world cannot be defined by science, but by our experience that we know to be true with the world. This was hard for me because I believe that I, as well as most Americans, are science orientated when we look at how things work because that is how we were taught to think in schools; the world is what it is because of the laws of science. But Ponty’s quote “All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless.” (pg. 277). This quote allowed me to think like Ponty and understand how my own everyday experience (even know scientifically based) are what define the world in my eyes opposed to just my knowledge of scientific laws that apply to the world that I learned from someplace else.
I struggled with MP's account of science as well, but this really illuminated the situation for me: "To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is." It might help to think of science a something we lay upon the world, like a map. I taught an orienteering class this summer, and we spent the first half of the class inside, learning how to read and orient maps, and the second class outside, walking upon the same land we looked at in the classroom. In the classroom, it is really easy to convince yourself that this mode of thinking perfectly corresponds to the world--that it is the right way of thinking. But as MP (and the second half of the course) suggests, that can only ever be a construct toward which reality is eternally indifferent, which becomes hauntingly evident when you lose ten 8-year-olds in the woods after learning their compasses are defective.
ReplyDeleteSide note: I eventually found them. In case you were worried.
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