Building his argument on the work of French philosopher / phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Abram provides a concise interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's work. The starting point is the material, sentient body, in the world, and its "silent conversation with things".
-- perception is inherently interactive, an act of participation, a reciprocal interplay between perceiver and perceived.
-- perceived things are encountered as animate, living (unfinished) presences. Our spontaneous pre-conceptual experience yields no evidence for a dualistic division between animate and inanimate phenomena, only for a relative distinction.
-- the complex interchange called "language" is rooted in the non-verbal exchange always already going on between our flesh and the flesh of the world.
Whereas traditional science privileges the sensible field, abstracted from the sensing experience (what one might call mechanistic materialism); and "New Age spiritualism regularly privileges pure sentience, or subjectivity, in abstraction from sensible matter" (and going so far as to claim the world is illusion created by mind or spirit),
both of these views perpetuate the distinction between human "subjects" and natural "objects", and hence neither threatens the common conception of sensible nature as a purely passive dimension suitable for human manipulation and use. While both of these views are unstable, each bolsters the other; by bouncing from one to the other -- from scientific determinism to spiritual idealism an back again -- contemporary discourse easily avoids the possibility that both the perceiving being and the perceived being are of the same stuff, that the perceiver and the perceived are interdependent and in some sense even reversible aspects of a common animate element, or Flesh, that is at once both sensible and sensitive. (pp 66-67)
Interdependence, reciprocity, interaction, participation, interpenetration -- this is the vocabulary of dialectics. This is no coincidence, as Merleau-Ponty was a Marxist in the post-WWII French intellectual tradition (for a fascinating history of that milieu, see Mark Poster's Existential Marxism in Postwar France). And coupled with this sensuous materialism -- a universe sensing and sensed, alive in some way -- this treatment excites, enlivens and elevates dialectical materialism.
Those two words, "dialectical" and "materialism", put together, are weighted down with so much historical baggage. On the one hand, suggesting some connection between Abram's work and dialectical materialism does a disservice to him (and Merleau-Ponty too) inasmuch as it may stop the prospective reader from going any further. On the other hand though, if "dialectical materialism" invokes history, exploitation and class struggle, then that perhaps is good.
Abram's book is a philosophy of ecology. He acknowledges the personal task of "remembering", "renewing reciprocity", not "going back" but "going full circle", "uniting our capacity for cool reason with this more sensorial, mimetic ways of knowing, letting the vision of a common world root itself in our direct, participatory engagement with the local and the particular." (270) The sensuous world is always local. He acknowledges also the political task of "engaging in political realities". He doesn't come out, though, and say that the destruction of the environment cannot be stopped short of stopping capitalism -- how can he? It's not that kind of book, and he may not be that kind of person. But that is the insight that "dialectical materialism" provides, and precisely the act that "dialectical materialism" invokes.
"Materialism" may be one of those words that has exhausted its usefulness, or ability to convey new meaning. Engels wrote how the conception of materialism had to keep pace with science. But the idea of "the Universe is one, and is as a whole absolutely self-determined, but no part of it is absolutely self-determined", "every part of the Universe is in mutually determining relations with the rest of the Universe," "the Universe is a material unity, and that this is becoming," "this material unity cannot be determined by thought alone, it is established by thought in unity with practice, by thought emerging from practice and going out into practice," as Christopher Caudwell wrote ["practice" I would say embraces all interaction with the world, doing things, of which laboring and the production process is of course a very important part].
This description of materialism, a dialectical materialism is not the mechanical materialism typically assumed as "materialism"; nor is it atomism or metaphysical materialism -- both outlooks were more or less destroyed by physics in the late 19th and 20th centuries. But it is a materialism that does not allow for a being outside of the Universe, not a Creator or an "Intelligent Designer". The Universe is It, feeling and being felt, not being, but becoming.
jd
The introduction to The Spell of the Sensuous
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment