Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So today is all about touching yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I always think of that.
Speaker 3 (00:05):
There's gonna be a lot of talk of touching myself
and touching me, touching you.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
If you're touching yourself, you're also touching yourself back. Yeah,
it's a handshake, that's one thing to call it.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
You're feeling the own touch too, so you're like feeling
yourself on the outside from the inside. It's weird when
you touch yourself you also feel yourself being touched by you. Yeah.
I mean it's obvious stuff, but then you put it
into words and it's.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Like, what huh, that's weird.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Phenomenology is trying to work that out.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
So lets me just say what we read. We read
two pages of Buddhist philosophy and twenty pages of French
philosophy because I thought there was a connection that we
mentioned last time, there might be a connection. Did you
guys see the connection?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Was it?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I did? Worth?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Oh yeah, absolutely, big time, big time, even a lot
of the same words.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
At certain points I thought I did. And you get
this a lot too if you read like Heidegger next
to like the doubted ching, or even just look at
the way Heidegger and had these scholars from like Japan,
these Buddhist scholars coming and learning his philosophy and translating it,
(01:20):
and now there's like a big you know, and there's
a big tradition of like a Buddhist phenomenology type of
stuff going on. I just phenomenology just seems to like
evoke Buddhism or vice versa. I don't know what it
is that they're very suggestive of one another.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
We're getting ahead of ourselves. I don't know if I
mentioned the thing that we read at the beginning, but
let's get organized. This work by Merleu Ponti. He died
while he was working on it, So the main work
of Merleu Ponti is the Phenomenology of Perception that was
early in his career. This was obviously the very end
(01:59):
of his career because he didn't finished it, and it's
published in English as The Visible and the Invisible. It
has attached to it a bunch of working notes. It's
pretty interesting, but the style is very different from the
Phenomenology of Perception because that's written basically as a scientist
(02:20):
studying disorders. The style of this one, however, the style.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Feels a little bit mystical, but in the way that
spinosa is mystical right of philosophy, mysticism, and he ends
up at the end of the book, which it wasn't
the actually the end of the book, but as far
as he got he ends up with a kind of
(02:49):
monism where everything is one based on sensory experience. But
we need to start here where he starts, which is
the type yourself thing, which is how how funny as
a joke. But you can touch your own body with
your own body, like you can put your hand on
(03:10):
your head, or you can put your hand on your arm,
or you can shake hands with yourself, both hands touching
each other. And this question about self touching that Merleu
Ponti has is what happens to subject an object in
self touch because here it's reversible.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
So it goes like this.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Let's say this, we think of ourselves as the toucher,
and then all the objects around us those are the
touched things. But you can do a little exercise at
home if you just grab one of your hands with
the other hand. Now in your mind, you can flip
back and forth with your with your mind, with your
(03:53):
perception here of which one is being the toucher and
which one is being touched, and it goes back and forth,
but you can only do one at one time, which
is kind of weird. So this becomes then the analogy
there are two sides of the same thing, which is
this visibility thing. But he says, what if all of
(04:17):
visibility and sensibility were one giant thing, this flesh, just
like in your mind when you're touching yourself, you can
flip back and forth, you have a subject an object.
What if all of visibility is an analogy of that,
like one giant mind, and every person with their perception
(04:39):
is just one aspect of It's like when you switch
your hand back and forth, you're just one of the hands.
Victor's another hand, Eric's another hand, and it goes and
it goes back and forth like that. That would add
up to this totality of basically a super a super organism,
a super godlike organism that it contains all of sensibility
(05:02):
within it, and if there's if it includes all people,
it includes all animals, it includes all life, if there's
life on other on other planets, other worlds, then we're
all part of one organism of sensibility. Even if we
don't meet. So I guess that's I'm hesitant to call
(05:23):
it an onto logical monism because this.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Has pree mystical the way that you described it.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yeah, it's it sounds, it sounds mystical and weird. But
he he kind of tricks you by going step by
step and then you arrive at that and you go, oh,
that has to be the conclusion.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Let's get even more basic with touching right, like touching
vision is touching things right like your eyes are directly
hooked up to your nervous system, your your the phobia
in your retina is literally like a piece of your
brain sticking out into your eyeball compartments. But you know,
it's still it's still a touching thing. What you perceive
(06:02):
to be empty space is is flesh. Just like the
flesh between your hands. When your right hand is touching
your left hand, there's there's a kind of flesh between
them as well. It's the flesh of the world, the
flesh of the body.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
I think I just don't understand what the point of
it is. I don't know, Like it just seems like conjecture.
It's like we have the the phenomena of our experience
and we can use it to gain insight into illusory structures,
illusory assumptions. But then it's like the next step to
be like, hey, I'm gonna name this thing and I'm
(06:37):
gonna turn it into an ontology that like things are connected.
And it's like you're taking a step that I feel
is like going beyond what's in the phenomena of experience.
It's like you're naming this thing and making a generalization
about like how it works and how it makes these
other things possible that you actually don't have direct access
to anymore at that point, because like you, like, the
(06:59):
phenomena of experience can point you to where gaps are.
But then you're like taking an additional step and I
just don't maybe maybe I'm just not understanding it. But
it's just it's just a step that, yeah, I just
don't understand it. I guess I just don't understand it.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
It's okay. We can, uh, we can figure out whether
we understand it or not, but we should at least
say what the what the problem is? So we start,
we start with ourselves, our own perception of things, and
we realize that we to be part of a world
where you can see things. M hm, you have to
(07:34):
also be see a bull. So there's that's what the
reciprocity is. I'm not I'm not telling you the answer here,
I'm just saying what he said.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
No, no, let's get the view right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
So after you see that you can only be seen
being seen, then you realize that anything that is in
it and again not we're not doing ontology. We're just
doing visible anything that's possibly visible. Everything is two dimensional.
But you know that yourself, even though you're visible, there's
(08:07):
more to you than just the surface. Then everything else
must have something another side that you can't see. And
this isn't mystical. This isn't mystical. It's just like I'm
looking at a monitor. I know it has a back that's.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
In phenomenology perception as well. That's same kind of insight.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
That's how far we are. But then what is the flesh.
The flesh is the generalness that all I don't know,
if you want to say matter, The flesh is everything
has a depth and a hiddenness that produces the stuff
that you can see. So the intertwiningness is the fact
(08:42):
that everything has a front and a back and an inside,
including like by the way air we think of air
as empty, it's it's not, it's just looser. So everything
has to be thick. And if everything is thick, then
this is what creates the sort of fl of the world.
And then his last point is to say, if everything
(09:03):
is the flesh of the world, that basically everything is
one one sort of thing. Everything is what.
Speaker 5 (09:10):
I also thought that he ended up in a kind
of monistic note like gave Mispinoza's vibes, because the sentences
what we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked over mass,
has no naming philosophy, so he tries, he tries, he
tries to name this intertwinedess of matter, like the intertwinedness
of matter that may be invisible. It's it's what he's
(09:32):
calling the flesh of things, like we are. We are
visible in the in the field of other objects or
in the field of other bodies, and we are seeing
visible objects in the horizon, but we are ourselves invisible
to us because we cannot see our own readiness.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
There's a pretty big so what and that it's all
of what we've called Western metaphysics started off on the
wrong foot and hasn't got on the right foot, since
because anything that can be called a thing has to
have this element in common with all other things, and
the philosophers have tried to answer that commonness by introducing difference,
(10:09):
especially matter versus mind. The So what is that for
any phenomenon to appear, they are already part of the
appearable And therefore all things are dependent. Seers are dependent
on things. Things are dependent on sears, ad infinitum. And
(10:30):
we never get to the special substance called matter, and
we never get to the special individuality of things. We
only get the folding of perception onto itself and things
appear there. Yeah, but they're illusions, even if they're useful illusions.
They are illusory that there's distances and differences in this way,
(10:51):
at least in the visibility way.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Like is he just saying is he just giving the
account that is consistent with phenomenalgy and then like the
way that it's discribed that I understand to hear, and
then just being like, oh, like the thing there's like
a thing that makes the world, Like like the fact
that there's different sides to things like that, like the
fact that like things work together. We're just gonna call
(11:16):
that flesh like I like, I like what is it?
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Like?
Speaker 2 (11:18):
What is the leap? Like? Where is the where is
what is the logical like conclusion? Like what what is
the step by step?
Speaker 4 (11:24):
Like?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
There for this.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
The flesh can be You could say it a different way.
And this is a little bit wrong, which is why
he doesn't say it. But the visibleness of things, And
if the problem with saying visibleness of things is that
now it's putting all of the burden on the sense
of sight, when he's all about this flesh.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
When really he just means our entire phenomenal engagement with
the thing, the like the possibility movement, possibility of movement,
of engagement, and.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
The possibility of difference. Even occurring difference can only occur
because there's something similar that can So this might be
something like the Buddhist nothingness maybe, like there has to
be a similarity before differences can appear as different, because
otherwise everything would disappear as thure.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
And this is a thing I do like about Merla
ponte is. I think he I would recruit him into
the the illustrious tradition of objective idealism right where, because
I think he is making a version of this sort
of Shillingian point that that's perceptual beings like humans. Sure,
(12:37):
our nature coming to a kind of self consciousness. Right,
So what's going on. One way to think about what's
going on in the subject to objectivision is that this
is a cleavage of the visible, right, it's the visible
coming and looking at another part of itself. And so
there's there's a there's a substrate there that's shared between
(13:00):
the two whatever you want to call that substrate, flesh
or reflective being or something. And then there's the sort
of nature coming to consciousness of itself, you know, the
tradition of objective idealism, Shelling, Purse, Merlot Ponte, people like that.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
What you just described, I mean, this comes up big
in what we'll cover the next time we are. There's
no cleavages in the blanket that is nature. This is
like iHeart hockeybees. There's no real cuts. Everything is just
a fold. So you and the problem with being a fold,
I guess is that you can look back at yourself
(13:37):
and reflect, and then you reflect back on the reflection
and then you go, oh, I'm separate from everything else,
and that's the wrong.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
That's what I meant by cleavage.
Speaker 5 (13:45):
It's like a yeah, yeah, yeah, what I was reading
these like I was in the back. I was having
a conversation with my wife. And it's kind of weird
to explain that. For example, if you want to explain
the act of seeing to somebody else where, does the
scene take place?
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Okay?
Speaker 5 (13:56):
So if I take away the retina, does it see, No,
it doesn't see. If I take the way the eye,
does it see? No, it doesn't see. If I take
the eye connected to the brain, does it see No,
it doesn't see. Do I have to take the brain
with the eye connected with the membranes and the neurotransmitters
that come from my gut biome in order to be
able to see. No, you also need something to be
able to see. So I take the object connected to
(14:18):
my brain, to the eye, to my retina, to my
gout bacteria, but it still doesn't see. What it's missing
is the flesh. The flesh is the field in which
all of this takes place. Is this intertwinedness between all
of this has enabled the act of seeing to happen,
like the folding that biels what was saying, like the event.
The event is the intertwinedess between all these isolated, idealistically speaking,
(14:42):
isolated parts of this whole system that enable the seeing
to happen.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
In our common sense, we basically think there's two worlds.
One is thought and representation, and then the other is
matter and stuff and what he calls the sensible. Yeah,
but what's crazy about I mean some self help kind
of shit here is you might feel isolated and different
and cut off, but your thought is made of the
(15:09):
same stuff that the world itself is made.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
So literally, the lesson is, iHeart hukabees. I heard hukabees
the good ones.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Wasn't the blanket of iheard huckeybees a reference to Spinoza?
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
I don't think they said, but they did call themselves
existentialist detectives.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Yeah. If you consider the fact that you go out
at night and you look out at stars, and the
light from those stars has been traveling for one hundred
million years, and the fact that you can see it,
that should be miraculous in a sense that that's the
same stuff way out there as you are way down here.