Sunday, April 1, 2012
Self-centeredness
While I think that in many ways Emerson and Merleau-Ponty oppose each other, they make a similar observation. In "Nature," Emerson writes that "the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind." On 280, MP writes, "The world, which I distinguished from myself as the totality of things or of processes linked by causal relationships, I rediscover 'in me' as the permanent horizon of all my cogitationes and as a dimension in relation to which I am constantly situating myself." There are a few commonalities here: one, man's recognition of a mind/body dichotomy, and two, man's reconciliation of this duality which takes places within man. Both see man as taking the world into himself; why this occurs is where they diverge. For Emerson, nature serves the mind. For MP, the distinction is invalid: "Our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly enunciated within us, is not a thing which can be any further clarified by analysis; philosophy can only place it once more before our eyes and present it for our ratification" (283). Key here is the word ratification. To ratify something is to confirm something which already exists. Nothing that occurs in our mind has any bearing on the world, because the world, as MP puts it, is "pre-personal."
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Noelle, I think you're right in your observation of the similarity and the difference here, but I read the referent of "it"(in "as it is untiringly enunciated") as "our relation to the world," not "the world" itself. In my reading, it is the relation, not the world, that is ratified (but not clarified or explained), which rather changes the sense of this passage, because it suggests that the ground from which we begin is the fusion of subject/object, mind/world...and somehow, paradoxically, this gets us to "the aseity of things," but that's the part I'm least clear about.
ReplyDeleteYes, that's what I meant when I said the distinction was invalid, and the fusion that you mention is precisely what makes it so. I got a little lazy in my writing towards the end, but what I meant was that no analysis or philosophy can develop our relationship with the world, because our relationship is pre-existing and immutable. I meant to say that Emerson would suggest that we can learn things about ourselves by studying the world, but that presupposes a distinction between the two that MP doesn't recognize (and, paradoxically (since we love paradoxes), what MP thinks destroys aseity)).
DeleteAnd I wouldn't be putting words in Emerson's and MP's mouths or extra parentheses at the ends of comments if it weren't 12:22 AM...
DeleteOh yes, good, okay -- we agree.
DeleteI thought you were sort of changing your tune mid-post there. The sentence that threw me was "Nothing that occurs in our mind has any bearing on the world," because it seems to suggest the possibility that we can know (of know of) a world apart form our relation to it...but maybe MP suggests as much? I don't know. I'm operating on very little sleep.
(ah. I've been reading "the world" wrong, as meaning something independent from the self. MP uses it to mean self+world.)
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