Lecture 13: - Merlau-Ponty, Time and Freedom

Hello folks, up to now we've been examining Merlupanti on embodiment. His general strategy involves overcoming rationalist and empirical assumptions to understand the human being in the world. This approach involves examining a variety of pathological conditions the phantom live, ignosia, aphasia, and osu-kinozia, which render explicit what was missing in rationalist and empirical approaches. These pathological conditions were only intelligent because of human embodiment. Now, I want to turn this week to the latter stages of the phenomenology of perception. There Merlupanti concludes phenomenology of perception with essays on the "cogito" intersubjectivity, "temporality" and "freedom". I want to concentrate on the latter parts, time and freedom, because these notions draw together the many themes which Merlupanti tackled across phenomenology of perception. Also, given Merlupanti deemed it necessary to conclude phenomenology of perception with a reflection on the nature of freedom, this tells us of the impartancy place and the idea. In this lecture, then I want to do three specific things. Firstly, I want to explain what Merlupanti has to say about the experience of time. This is important because Merlupanti's philosophical defeats the freedom is inseparable from the question of "temporality". This was counter to the "convigual accounts of freedom and philosophy", could name the free will and determinism. In the second section, I explain how Merlupanti constructs an alternative account of freedom as a form of self-awareness. In the last section, I outline Merlupanti's own theory of human freedom. Part one, time and the ego. In the penultimate section of phenomenology of perception, Merlupanti articulates the essential nature of time for consciousness. In this section, he looks at other theories of time, from Henri Berkson and Edmund Husserl to explain how self-consciousness, self-awareness emerges. Merlupanti's answer is that self-awareness emerges in a temporal way. On this, he deviates somewhat and radicalizes Husserl's account of time. Husserl famously drew a distinction between primary memory and secondary memory. Second memory was representational, referring to how we retain the distant past, or how the distant past is repre-thinted. Primary memory was immediate and referred to how we perceive, retain and anticipate the immediate past-president future. This is what Husserl termed, rather catch-ally, the "potential-retential order of internal time-consciousness." The difference between primary memory and secondary memory is one of immediacy. Second memory retains the distant past. The "potential-retential order of internal time-consciousness" refers to the immediate flow of experience itself. Husserl likens the "potential-retential order of internal time-consciousness" to a comet, but the present moment illuminated while past impressions fade out and future impressions emerge. For Husserl, disentangling these two ideas is crucial. If we don't, we simply can't distinguish between the distant past and the immediate perception of past-president and past future. Or we could not disentangle something which happened last year from what is happening right now. Merloponte accepts Husserl's account of primary memory. It does, though, hesitate about the serial nature of Husserl's temporal perception. Despite Husserl's best efforts, Merloponte thinks that his theory of time, Husserl's that is, still reduces our experience of time to a series of now-pints or moments severed from past and future. Merloponte thinks there is, generally, in inherent confusion in the way we talk about time. We continually mix up both succession and simultaneity, our sameness and change. Instead, Merloponte argues that to have a perception of past and future, we need to think of a subject who lives present as time. This will help us get past any potential confusions where we separate the flow of time into different moments. Merloponte is trying to articulate something deeper, I think. We talk about time as a form of presence. He's not suggesting that time is reducible to the present, to the now, in contrast, he is talking about the essential form of time itself. Equally, when Merloponte talks about the notion of presence, he's not saying that the present has a priority over past and future. We are, though, time. That is the key insight. Time is a horizon of intelligibility, where we make any claim about anything really concerning our embodied life. We are always, pre-supposing time. We can see this point where Merloponte criticizes Burke's song. Merloponte thinks Burke's song's account of time as duration is limited. Burke's insist time is a form of continuity, and thus ultimately explains time is extended, and therefore time is something intrinsically spatial. This is not really a theory of time for Merloponte because it denies time altogether. When we perceive, we do not really experience perceptions as extended or attached to memories which grasp things past. To recollect is not to proceed with a picture of consciousness, picky out past moments, and then attaching them to present experiences. That would be a bit silly, as it implies that any recollection of the past is a direct reliving of it, or a past time. To perceive is not to remember, but to be the temporal flow itself. Of course, what stabilizes the flow of time for Merloponte is bodily presence itself. We've seen this already foreshadowed in his account of habit as the continual adaptation of past present to future within an environment. This view of temporal embodiment has consequences for how we understand self-consciousness. The first thing we need to do is depart, as you might expect, from empirical, rational, and transcendental accounts of subjectivity. So Merloponte does not really think of time as a thing. He's not really viewing time like Aristotle might as a byproduct of movement and motion. Nard, as he think time, is a byproduct of psychological contents, say like a memory. Rotor, time is the form of perception itself. We can't really understand how a thinking subject and a positive or become aware of itself in time. If we presuppose a transcendental ego, doing all the work prior to our perception. Equally, if we think of time as the flux of impressions, we cannot think about how one present impression connects to another. Once we have a subject as positing itself, then we fall into the contradiction of an ego prior to perception abstracted as it were, organizing temporal perception, or an ego passively experiencing the flux of impressions. Merloponte does propose a simple enough solution to this opposition. What we need to do is grasp how the subject is identified with temporality. Once we do this, then self-positivity is no longer a contradiction because it expresses time as lived. What does this entail for a self-conscious install? Well, it asks us to see subjectivity itself as inherently temporal. Time is the effecting of self-by-self as Merloponte says. The living embodied presence is the movement of presence from past to present, passing towards the future. Here, there is no real separation between the subject as affected and affecting, precisely because, in Merloponte's terms, the thrust of time is transition, or the very act of transitioning itself. When the future, past and present are conjoined, we do not think, I would do not have to think, of a time subject or a time object. This problem is really a pseudo-problem stemming from our fidelity to dualism or the subject object distinction, where the future, past and present coexist in the movement of time creation, then we no longer have to think of two abstract moments of time as experienced our time as subjectively inaugurated. Time is coextensive of what are being towards the world. As Merloponte suggests, and I quote, "The world as a cradle of meanings, the direction of all directions and ground of all thinking, how to leave behind the dilemma of reason and idealism contingency and absolute reason, nonsense and sense." Time therefore is a presence in the world, or rather the world. The subject is ecstatic, which is to say, constitutively outside itself, always in the business of transcending itself. Merloponte's transcendence is an act of transcendence. The world is inseparable from the subject, and we temporally exist along with the world. Time therefore is the ultimate form of what we can and cannot experience. Hence embodiment itself is conceived with a dynamic unfolding of the world. Live the presence affirms the past, which slips away and anticipates the future, that is, to come. Time exists in so far as I am situated in a bodily way in a world. But because I am situated in a world, therefore the totality of time is not available to me. The things of the world, too, are farmed out of both the traces and sediments of their pre-existence as well as their survival. But of course, for things of the world, time is not an issue. The world, consider so, must be therefore the ground of how I perceive it. Equally constituted rather than constituting from a form of pre-existence and survival, this inherent ambiguity reveals a contingency of self-awareness. Self-consciousness itself is the activity of time, and as an activity is therefore unfinished. From Eloponte and I quote, "There can be time only if it is not completely deployed. It is the essence of time to be in the process of self-production, and not to be never, that is to be completely constituted." In a way, the time of self-consciousness begets time, because the distinguishing feature of our embodied "temporality" is self-production as it operates in the world. Time cannot be bought to completion as that presupposes the negation of time, our "atternity." Part 2 - Time A Self-awareness There is one further implication, which Meloponte identifies as crucial for our understanding of self-awareness. If we were to think of time as just a form of flow, then it would be something that carries on without our awareness of it. In some sense, we might say that this is what happens anyway, as we go about our business in the everyday world, time is not necessarily something that our attention latches on to. But from Eloponte, this would not be quite the right way of thinking about the matter. If the time is the horizon of any perceptual experience, did our everyday business also presupposes at temporal horizon, whether we are attentive to it or not? Meloponte goes further. Time is not just restricted to actual flow, but also it is inherently entwined with how we are aware of ourselves. And short time is thinking itself. The form of time or time is very important. If we think of the phenomenon of time as something thinkable, then at the very least it is defined by intrinsic completion. The present is never a present forever, since it is over once it arrives and thus becomes the past. And the future is only the appearance of a goal towards which we move, which too is incomplete since it arrives. Putting a very basic way, this is what thinking is itself. Meloponte is quite explicit on this. He says that, and I quote, "The explosion or the heiscence of the present towards the future is the act type of the relationship of self to self." And it shows up in interiority or obséate. The heiscence means differentiation, separation. Epséate means self-affection. The heiscence as time shows that self-awareness is continuing self-producing itself. The heiscence just means separation or difference. So the form of self-consciousness is the activity of differentiating and demarcating, as opposed to, say, static psychological attributes. The body, because of its depth, because of its habitual nature, because of its intentional arcs, projects itself as past, present, and future, navigating one situation to another, retaining and maintaining its activity itself over time. All conscious awareness is bodily awareness. The body anchors the self in relative terms, providing the temporal density to locate us in a world, as well as the flexibility to transcend our current location. And this is the complex type of self-awareness where the pante is asking us to grasp. All self-awareness is temporarily situated, embodied awareness opens to enacting possibilities. In his context, freedom, therefore, is the backdrop to all bodily action. If we were to concentrate freedom just on choice and decision, that we would actually destroy the concept of freedom, because freedom is all he intelligible against the backdrop of an implicit situation of influence against which free acts can be made explicit. We are bodily and historically prior to being deliberate of agents. Maripanti's emphasis on the anti-predicative body argues that we are pre-structured by skills, habits, dispositions, and to be pre-structured though is not to be caused. As those skills, habits, and dispositions are actively responding and adapting to any environment we inhabit, all was grasping for future possibilities. Consequently, my living presence opens on to a past which I am no longer in the future that I am not yet nor may never have lived. The eye, therefore, the ego is inherently open, transcending its own coordinates in time and space because of its unfinished nature. This means that the ego can never enclose in on itself, and it also means other temporalities are possible, whether they can be found in the encounter with another or the social world or collective history. Therefore, it is always true time that we can have any account of self-awareness, significance, or reason. It is not true that subjectivity would be a static monot, able only to perceive itself as and now. Since anything we call present automatically implies a demarcation of past and future. Marloponte calls presence, or lived presence, is our primordial experience of time. Marloponte sees time not as an eternal consciousness or an activity carried out by a self-positing ego, rather, as Marloponte says, and I quote, "I am not the creator of time. I am not the initiator of the process of temporalization." Therefore, we do not offer time according to Marloponte. He goes on, "But time flows true me, whatever I do. Time thus is the horizon of my self-awareness, with the essential condition of possibility. Embodied time is self-aware time." I cannot make time, but I am the activity of temporalization itself. The self is an intentional embodied being in the world is thus dynamic, continually aiming towards and retaining itself in an act of movement. Hence, the time Marloponte is referring to throughout phenomenology of perception is the time of life itself. Time cannot be closed determined, and thus Marloponte sees our understanding of ourselves as temporary and body beings as the foundation of human freedom. Not three, temporal freedom. When it comes to the question of freedom, Marloponte deviates from the classic formulation of the problem. That is the opposition between freedom and determinism. Here, if someone is determined, they cannot be free. Or, inversely, if someone is free, or self-causing, they are not determined. Marloponte boldly dispenses with the question of causality for understanding freedom. Instead, he reformulates why freedom is essential for any understanding of the human being, where we are free, not because we can transcend any proceeding causal nexus, but because we are constituted as embodied temporal beings. Freedom is thinkable because, as we have seen, our body is fundamentally contingent. If it is contingent, it is therefore inherently open to being otherwise. Furthermore, if our embodied being is continually self-producing, self-in an incomplete way, disemplies we are actively in determined. Freedom is therefore given to me prior to any conceptualization or deliberative act of decision. For Marloponte, freedom is given within a network of bodily intentionalities, and situated within a given field of possibility. Because we are embodied, being towards the world, freedom is a mode of that very being, disposing us to the ever-present possibility of transcending ourselves. At the outset of the final chapter in phenomenology of perception, Marloponte claims that, and I quote, "It is clear that no causal relationship is conceivable between the subject and his body, his world and his society." Marloponte does not think that there is no such thing as cause and effect. He only thinks that these are restricted to things. If I am determined, it is because I am a thing. But throughout phenomenology of perception, Marloponte has resolutely shown that we are not intelligible as things. The other alternative might be to see freedom as emerging from motivation, where I have a motive force to discard all the norms that I am. Freedom here is equated with voluntary deliberation, an act of will, where I choose the strongest path out of a range of possible alternatives. Neither of these two positions are satisfactory from Marloponte. On the one hand, we have a scientific concept of determinism, and on the other, we have an idealist assertion of absolute freedom, diverse from the world itself. This shows us how freedom is connected to the question of time, or needs to be connected to the question of time from Marloponte. To think about freedom as synonymous with choice, decision and act of will, bespeaks a deficient understanding of why we are free. To say freedom is equivalent to an act is actually to say something about temporality. It is to say that freedom is all he thinkable in terms of an isolated moment. The act is in the now, a choice is always carried out in the present, but this again does not tell us about how we operate the world. A truly free act requires contingency in our determination. To say that an act is determined is to say ego consciousness does the determining, which would abstract us from the vicissitudes of our own worldly situation. Freedom, if it is to be a stake for us, implies a commitment to moving the present from a past to a future. That which is free requires a duration of sorts. It is an ongoing project or sets a project which is always a issue for us. Freedom is something else entirely from Erluponte. Freedom is the backdrop of our environmental embodiment. We are certainly located in space, space and time, but that locating is as we have seen actively self-producing itself, self-mentaining itself until death. Because we are self-producing, Erluponte thinks we are always beginning, and beginning implies continual novelization, so our embodied activity continually projects itself into an open world. If this were not the case, we would not really be able to act at all as no separation would be possible from one place to the next. Here, Erluponte is talking about our embodimenters continually adapting to a given range of possibilities. Unless there are open situations requiring a possibility of achievement, of enactment and completion, or even a failure to achieve and accomplish, we never really experience freedom. That I am socially situated, does not preclude my freedom. I suppose the way of getting to the heart of what you are saying is that I am relatively free. I am neither absolutely determined nor absolutely free. I wouldn't could ask though if relative freedom is truly free, one cannot really be free, one might think, "Oli, if one is free to an extent." This though is a bit of a pseudo problem from Erluponte, since an act of temporal being that I am, my actions cannot be from their inception either wholly free or determined. My actions in a situation are not decisive. I cannot take up a choice which wholly severes me from the world I inhabit. Choice itself already is only intelligible in the context of a range of possible projects and commitments. My actions are certainly motivated by my concrete situation, but neither are they restricted to the situation. If this were the case, all I could be, what be this particular situation or this particular norm, be that lecturer, husband, father, painter, CEO or revolutionary? Freedom is not something I do voluntarily, nor is it something negated by like causal makeup. Instead, freedom is the leading of a free life as an embodied human being. So when Erluponte is talking about freedom, he is not really making explicit value judgment. He is not saying it is good to be free necessarily. He is performing a phenomenology of perception and he is therefore trying to make explicit the type of being we are, the form of the being we are, and the type of beings we are are beings that are free within the constraints of our situation. That is the freedom, Merluponte thinks is significant. The condition of possibility of our corporeal being is unfinished, and thus we are always grasping and reaching across a span of time and place. Freedom does not eliminate our situation as the volunteers might suggest. NAR doesn't mean we are not influenced by our situation. This is what Merluponte calls a rationalist dilemma, where either an event is caused by me or was imposed on me by external causes. Instead, one's freedom is the condition of possibility of being a body in the world. Our situations are inherently open, which implies that I am a being between action and possibility. Indeed, I am the being that virtually exists between acts and resolutions. As I find myself in my concrete embodied being, I can certainly make choices. But a choice is not a supreme act of will separate from the situations or the range of alternatives it faces. So, and I quote Merluponte here, "In my absolute concreteness, as I am presented to myself in reflection, I find that I am an anonymous and pre-human flux, as yet unqualified as, for instance, a working man or middle class. If I subsequently think of myself as a man among men, a bourgeois among bourgeois, this can be, it will seem, no more than a second-order view of myself." Thus, I cannot absolutely determine myself in any of these roles that Merluponte mentions. What I really am is a being that freely evaluates the operation of these roles in certain contexts. To say something like one's social class, one's economic conditions, or even one's sexuality, as a result of a free choice would be to abandon our historicity, and equally to say what I am is determined by my economic class. That too misses something essential. One could say that one is a bourgeois, but one's social class is not voluntarily called into being. Instead, it is a description of common patterns of behaviour, shared circumstances, the cultural factors and affiliations we identify with, but which are equally contestable. These things form and influence us for sure, but not absolutely. A choice then is only meaningful against a context of concrete norms, where we can understand norms as the different commitments or roles we face up to in our lives. So Patrick has the norm of being a father, and Patrick has the norm of being a philosophy lecturer. Usually these norms coincide for Patrick, sometimes though they might not. The prioritisation, or choice of one norm over another, tells us something about the contingency of embodied freedom. Norms do not just reveal something factual about me, something finished. As in, I am a thing called father and that is all I am, or that I choose freely to be a father, and that is all I am. Norms and roles reveal that our commitments are defined by activity. By the activity of sustaining, our failing to sustain themselves across the span of my life. To be a bourgeois, a lecturer, a working class, is to identify a set of commitments which can be carried out or fail. Marlopantie thus, I think, has quite a unique take on what freedom is. Freedom is subjectivity, or embodied subjectivity in general. Insofar as my subjectivity is always already disposed towards an open world that is. Freedom, please suppose, is beginning, a situation, a place, even a factual set of coordinates in relation to which a person cannot but decide on sets of priorities and commitments, either by endorsing or refusing them. Basically, decisions do not occur in a void, but require, as a condition of possibility of certain context, what Marlopantie will call a field of presence or even general social factors. This is why we cannot say Marlopantie is endorsing a type of ethical individualism because he is not really talking about your specific roles and interests. As interesting in all as they may very well be to you. In contrast, he is talking about what it is likeness of being a human in the world. This is why, and I quote, "I must apprehend around my absolute individuality a kind of halo of generality, or a kind of atmosphere of sociality." Hence, we are fundamentally ambiguous beings at once anonymous, that is utterly general and individual at the same time, so therefore utterly specific. And this is why being a human is, first and foremost, a paradoxical business in itself. My freedom is already indebted to a variety of contextual, social, economic, political, and cultural factors which define the range of my possible actions. And here we find traces of a can'tian thought. Freedom is not caprice. Freedom occurs in the reciprocity of agent and situation. So when Marlopantie talks about freedom, he is really trying to show that freedom is always of concern for human beings. The phenomenology of perception is about showing the forms of beings we are and the types of beings we are, is beings who are self-aware, temporal, embodied, and who cannot but lead a life, cannot but prioritize, I did defy, and project ourselves across the span of our time between birth and death. The form of time, what time is, is very important here. If we think of the phenomenon of time as something thinkable, then at the very least it is defined by intrinsic incompletion. The present is never a present forever, since it is over once it arrives, and thus becomes the past, and the future is only the appearance of a goal to reach which we move, which too is incomplete since it arrives. Thinking these thoughts at once is critical to understanding the nature of time. The primary phenomenon that enames my freedom is that I am continually given to myself as temporarily embodied being. By given, Merluponte means I happen upon myself, where I find myself always already situated in a physical, material, and social world. As a situation, this is not something which is obscure to me, now is it something which suppresses me or restricts me like a thing of the world. I am alive, and thus because I am alive, I bear a different relation to the things of the world, and indeed other forms of life, for Merluponte, and I quote, "It is a fate for me to be free, to be unable to reduce myself to anything that I experience, to maintain in relation to any factual situation a faculty of a draw, and this fate will seal the moment my transcendental field was thrown open, when I was born as vision and knowledge, when I was thrown into the world." Freedom then places the human being in a somewhat contradictory position. I am inserted into the world as a general refusal of the norms which constitute me as well as a continual but qualified acceptance of such norms. Freedom then is a continual reiteration of this ambiguous being, a reiteration of an activity of past, present and future which I cannot escape. I repeat to newer contexts my place between the roles I've inherited and the priorities I must take, as well as the things I must forsake." And I quote, "What then is freedom? To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted but also never completely constituted. In the first case, we are acted upon and the second we are opened in infinite number of possibilities, but this analysis is still abstract. For we exist in both ways at once. There is therefore never determinism and never absolute choice. I am never a thing and never bear consciousness. In conclusion, what makes freedom possible is not, as has conventionally been assumed the twins of a determining free will or a determining causality. Rather freedom is all possible because of pre-situated embodied cognition, history, intersubjective culture, art, and chart life itself. Instead of obviating freedom, these structures make freedom possible. When it comes to freedom then from Eloponte, it really is fundamentally ambiguous. And that is kind of ostensibly a paradox in itself if you think about it, one can't really have an unclear or shaky fundament. But in another sense, we are that kind of being. What is essential? Or what we are is ambiguously free. Therefore, we are neither absolutely free nor absolutely determined. Freedom, hence, looks very different from Eloponte. Being bodies that are free means that we are located in a space, place, time, but also oriented towards the future. Freedom then is the freedom to succeed and fail. That is what we are. We are the beings for whom possibilities are always available and continually being actualized. Therefore, nothing determines me extrinsically because I am, for my inception, always already outside of myself. Conversely, freedom is not constrained to choosing where I am the autonomous self-legislating being emancipated from all restrictions. Rather, we are free because our bodies dispose us towards a temporal horizon, imposes upon us the question of possibility. Making us realize we exist in a world where choice is, alternative to possibilities. If not necessarily inaugurated by them, are always at stake. Always imposing on us the question as to what we ought to do and what we ought not to do with our embodied life.