Dissertation:
Initial Thoughts
My dissertation discusses the idea that the phenomenological origins of language are rooted in our sensuous receptivity to the world around us, embodied in the gestural and auditory responses to the sounds, movements and perceived patterns of our animated environment. It opens up the question as to whether the body itself might be possessed of an agency of participation with the very surroundings which are included within its experience, to the extent of confounding the distinction subject/object as an artificial convention. It will further discuss the phenomenological origins of astrological language and explore the extent to which an embodied experiential engagement with its symbols and metaphors might be constructively applied as a means of self-reflective philosophical enquiry applicable in educational contexts.
Merleau-Ponty asserts that all language is generated in the gestural act of speaking and rejects the notion that language is a detachable system of formal conventions which can somehow be separated from the embodied act of speaking. At the same time, such a view is used to advocate the primacy of human thinking and used to re-inforce the idea of human dominance over the more-than human world. "The spoken word is a gesture and its meaning, a world...Faced with an angry or threatening gesture, I have no need in order to understand it, to recall the feelings that I myself experienced when I used these gestures on my own account...The gesture does not make me think of anger. It is anger itself."[1] The written word removes us from direct participation with the animating presence that sits in the places where our stories, our embodied wisdom once belonged. The words on the page become animated in their own right, but their earthy origins are lost. Experiences are thus formulated outside of nature and place is reduced "to only a stage upon which the human drama is enacted".[2]
"Reality" to an indigenous people often appears to constitute of a set of rituals and significant gestures that imitate the immanent participating agencies of the more-than-human world. Such gestures, according to Mircea Eliade "acquire the meaning attributed to them only because they deliberately repeat such and such acts posited ab origine (in the beginning??) by gods, heroes or ancestors."[3]. Ritual enactment is "the reproduction of a primordial act through the repetition of a mythical example."[4]
This is the question that dominates the thinking of a literate society. Creation is something that happened – literally - once long ago in a linear timeline that is impossible for us to imagine. To an indigenous people, creation did not happen once, it is happening right now in the telling, singing or enactment of the story. The creation stories are told and re-told, sung and re-sung, enacted as ritual drama as a way of binding the human community "to the ceaseless round dance of the cosmos".[5] The experience of 'dwelling' is integral to the cyclical dance of time and the sky is inextricably wedded to the living landscape. In a literate society, by contrast, we develop the notion of a fixed historical timeline, described by Shepard as "a western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat."[6]
Re-engagement with the Cosmos through Astrology
Astrology speaks in terms of cycles and repeating patterns, each of which appear to reflect an earthly correspondence, and are engaged with as such by means of an intervention or divinatory ritual (negotiation with the gods, spirits or ancestors?). Astrology might be said to operate through a set of ambiguous linguistic conventions, which require imaginal[7] participation. Astrologers generally translate these symbols into a common parlance in order to speak about the world. Yet their ambiguity requires the astrologer to engage with them imaginatively or intuitively in order to accomplish this is often expressed through active speech for the consulting astrologer. (If interpretations are written down, do they become disenchanted / disembodied?) Each astrological metaphor can be also be expressed through interpretive gesture and experienced through the body. Through ritual drama, movement, song, dance I suggest that astrological language can, perhaps more authentically, be a way of speaking to the world, a way of honouring our environment and the animating presences that occupy and enrich the so-called 'space' around us.
Questions
Through ritual participation in the "pre-eminent cosmogonic act"[8] inherent in the cosmic signatures of my own birth, how might I gain access to a greater understanding of what limits me now or is available to me as a possibility, and how is that embodied in this moment.
If the 'gods' are immanent to my experience, then what am I doing speaking about them in their presence? Should I not be addressing them directly?
Feedback from Monday conversation
For Merleau-Ponty, inner and
outer are inseparable. Any study
of that which is perceived will end up revealing the perceiving subject.
"...the body will draw to itself the intentional threads which bind it to
its surroundings and finally will reveal to us the perceiving subject as the
perceived world" (PP ref??). Merleau-Ponty challenges the assumptions of
intellectual philosophy through his insistence upon the ambiguous intertwining
of inner and outer, as revealed through an authentic phenomenological analysis
of the body. All human
subjectivity is paradoxical. I am
both a part of the world and coextensive with it, constituting but also
constituted. The world is already
constituted, yes still emerging in its constitution. "There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute
choice".[9]
[1] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, "Phenomenology of Perception", p.184.
[2] Paul Shepard, cited by Abram, David, "Spell of the Sensuous", p.181.
[3] Eliade, Mircea, "The Myth of the Eternal Return", p. 5-6
[4] ibid.
[5] Abram, David, "Spell of the Sensuous", p.186
[6] Paul Shepard, cited by Abram, David, "Spell of the Sensuous", p.181.
[7] 'Imaginal' is a term coined by Henri Corbin, to incorporate the idea of a co-creative imagination capable of participating with "extrahuman" (Eliade) / "more-than-human" (Abram) entities. See: http://www.hermetic.com/bey/mundus_imaginalis.htm
[8] Eliade, Mircea, "The Myth of the Eternal Return", p. 18.
[9] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, "Phenomenology of Perception", p. 453