Hello friends
I continue with this essay and although I mentioned that I would do it in two parts, I think I extended a little more than planned and I will take a third and maybe a fourth part to expose my phenomenological approach to feeling, after reading and thinking about the conceptions on this subject from Maria Zambrano and Merleau Ponty.
Today I bring you three sections of equal importance, continuing the ideas exposed in my previous post ( https://read. cash/@cesarandresdp/a-phenomenological-approach-to-feeling-part-1-f542117c#feeling-not-as-a-faculty-but-as-a-mode-of-being ) today I will talk about how I perceive feeling, thinking it as a middle point between the sensitive and the sentient, then how our reason gains space or ground when it incorporates feeling and does not exclude it as it has been so often done, and finally in this second installment I expose an idea that is deeply influenced by Maria Zambrano, since it is about conceiving thought as a heartbeat.
Source: https://ethic.es/2021/02/el-exilio-de-maria-zambrano/
-Feeling is a conjunction between the sensitive and the sentient:
The sensible and the sentient seem to establish a dichotomy, but in truth, both are affirmed in a simultaneous exchange. This conception inherited from Edmund Husserl since he understood the body as sensitive in a double modality (sense and sentient). And Zambrano wants to bring reason closer to experience, a vital experience. Perhaps it is understood what our philosopher meant when at some point in her life she spoke about the experience and expressed that this, came to be not the compendium of things lived, but the cumulus of things reflected. The feeling comes to respond to the force of things. To speak of thinking is to want to decipher what one feels, intentionality is evidenced in feeling as conjunction.
Life possesses as a condition to see itself by seeing itself in another. With what has been said, accepting feeling as a link, conjunction of the sensible and the sentient allows transcending any duality, although one could interpret this aspect of feeling, following Hegel's dialectic of the master and the slave. There is, then, a beyond any dualism or a bipolar consideration where both parts are juxtaposed. From Merleau-Ponty the midpoint or the focus of feeling as the feeling is nothing other than "being-in-the-world", feeling as a mode of being. As a way of facing reality and of facing the irrational (the other). Under the philosophical umbrella, we seek to bring feeling out of its obscurity, the irrational as a pre-reflexive sphere immersed in the rational, however, before continuing in this pre-reflexive aspect we should pause. This approach leads us to a reason that seeks to enlarge its frontiers, to reach what until now had been outside its walls.
- Reason is expanded when it incorporates feeling:
Merleau-Ponty and Zambrano in their philosophical work as a phenomenological existential philosophy of feeling, expressed by María del Carmen López Sáenz. It is nothing more than a vital discourse with the intention of deepening in a non-Cartesian reason. The modern paradigm had to be left aside. The reason will be expanded when philosophically trying to delve into the dark dimensions of life. To bring feeling out of its obscurity and to broaden the logos become maxims for our thinkers.
It is impossible not to link the feeling to its affective situation, although this does not exhaust it. "The affective situation of man is to suffer and to transcend, and not only to suffer but to suffer himself; to bear the burden of passivity "* It is not inactive suffering because the subject of suffering realizes and feels what he suffers. Paraphrasing Zambrano in one of his passages of Philosophy and Poetry, one does not find the whole man in philosophy, nor the totality of the human in poetry, philosophy is a search by means of a method, poetry is a discovery. I believe that Zambrano's subtlety is interested in evidencing the shortcomings of dichotomies, I do not know how conscious María was of the classical maxim "divide and conquer", but this seemed to be a question that she wanted to abolish in the conception of the human condition. Philosophy and poetry, reason and myth, body and soul, or any question that prevented a broader worldview. Maria knows that knowledge goes through a sensory stage and reaches the intellect, but that both processes are one, to put it epistemically.
Returning to the view of philosophy and poetry, Zambrano at the midpoint locates a metaphysics of creation. Because, from every poetic consciousness emanates an act. This means, that from the metaphysics of creation the artistic action that configures and reveals the purest truth. And that as art, the process of human creation is known, and this does not start from the search for knowledge as does philosophy or science, but has the intention to exist without splits to return to the original state that preceded the dualisms. And that art teaches us to see the world, to see beyond the visible things. To unveil invisibility. To look requires time and it is necessary to leave a garment, María Zambrano would tell us. But about art, we will expand the horizon later, with what has been said, it opens the way to the impulse that gives art as a look at the world with eyes that look from a pre-reflective point of view.
-Thought as a heartbeat:
The heartbeat could be diminished by saying that it is the action of the heart by which the blood is pumped, and perhaps add hundreds of physiological terms that are beside the point. Besides, by diminishing the heartbeat, we would also limit the action of the heart to something fundamentally physical and corporeal from the traditional and dualistic conception, because nothing brings me to the soul the systole and diastole in perpetual movement, until the imminent tunic of death veils my eyelids. But nevertheless, from our living, there are irrationalities that found us. The heartbeat, not as a nervous impulse that keeps us alive, but as an irrationality that gives us a breath, arouses our emotions. Merleau-Ponty asserts that it is necessary to be able to expand reason so that it may contain even those irrationalities, those that have been condemned to silence. The power of feeling comes from the logos, a living in reason in order to seek the reason for living. Zambrano, for his part, expresses that poetic reason welcomes feeling because it is intuitive and is nourished by metaphors that serve to unveil the mystery, in order to point to a knowledge about the soul.
Thought as a heartbeat unveils a submerged, tacit, hidden logos. Because it is thought that wonders about the common origin of thinking and beating, reducing them to their birth. An original horizon that is founded on reason and from which it can never detach itself, not even to be founded. A feeling feeling from the pre-thematic of the human condition. This pre-thematic condition opens a reflection that is not yet intellectualized, by feeling feeling feeling. Exemplified by the two hands that shake, putting an end to the dichotomy of subject and object. Founding a pre-linguistic level.
That pre-linguistic state for Zambrano is the clamor from within, that which is known as a submerged logos gives reason from the darkness in which it dwells. And he uses an indirect and symbolic language, he realizes that the origin of all reflection is precisely what comes before, what was called the pre-reflexive sphere and that passively determines us. Zambrano had Ortega y Gasset as his teacher and from him he somehow inherited the maxim: "I am I and my circumstance", this condition of possibility of the human known as "circumstance" in a broad sense, for Zambrano comes to mean the tacit, the hidden, the penumbra. And the beat, as that circumstance that makes it possible for me to feel, and to feel myself as a self-absorbed reflection, as Merleau-Ponty would say, and which we will return to later, "...a landscape without geography... "***.
Thus I end this section number two of my phenomenological essay, thank you for joining me in this essay.
* Zambrano, M., Los sueños y el tiempo, (1992) Siruela, Madrid, pag. 12
** López Sáenz, M. (2013) Merleau-Ponty y Zambrano: el “logos” sensible y sintiente Aurora. Departamento de filosofía. UNED
*** López Sáenz, M. (2007) Los sueños, el tiempo y la pasividad. M. Zambrano y la fenomenología. La lámpara de Diógenes. Revista de filosofía. Números 14 y 15; pp. 59-77
Thank you for reading
