The Phenomenal Fells

The living body, the organism, is a system of vital functions - eidos at work, en ergo. Reality is energeia, idea at work. 

Jan Potocka, Subject Body and Ancient Philosophy

On the train to Kilpatrick this morning I read a little of the great Czech phenomenologist Jan Potocka whose book Body, Community, Language, World was a revelation some five years ago upon finding it in Glasgow University Library.

Phenomenology (as Husserl saw it) arose out of a radical will to self-clarity, to grasping the ultimate ground for what it is that I am. For Potocka, more so than for Husserl or Heidegger, the body was key to this clarity: the body as a multiplicity of relations in and with this world, and specifically the situatedness of this body (its structures of perception, its bodily orientation in space, etc.).  This dynamism, of a body's ongoing correspondence with its world, and hence its evolution is precisely the principle of a living animate creature.

Potocka's philosophy of movement begins with the question - What sort of body? And then a partial answer - Not the body that anatomy or physiology examine, but body as a subjective phenomenon, the human body as we live it in lived experience.

The ground of phenomenology as its etymology suggests (phenomenon - that which presents itself; logos - meaningful discourse) is taken up by the living well-springs of experience. It seeks to keep ready-made theses at arm's length and instead investigate everything contained within experience, how we arrive at it, and what seen and lived realities underlie it. Potocka writes: only by speaking it out do we know something fully, only what we speak out do we fully see. 

At its most basic, its most essential, the practice of phenomenology is learning to think and see; in short learning to understand.... not through some intellectual exercise, but through living itself. I guess, as far as this is concerned, this whole exercise of essays and notes contained here in this blog, since it springs out of direct experience in the field, is phenomenological in essence. As far as I see it, the only way to truth is to live it.

The phenomenal Kilpatrick Braes at the beginning of Spring (21st March, 2015)

Every 'body' needs a perch from where it can gather the Self, space (and time) out, forget its small and corrupt self, and gaze across this fertile earth. And in so doing, reclaim its wholeness and holiness.

The absolute body (complete with broken wrist), perched on the pulpit of peace.  

A renewed attentiveness to bodily experience enables us to recognize and affirm our inevitable involvement in that which we observe, our corporeal immersion in the depths of a breathing Body much larger than our own. [...] Examining the contours of this world not as an immaterial mind but as a sentient body, I come to recognize my thorough inclusion within this world in a far more profound manner than our current language usually allows.  

David Abrams, Merleau-Ponty & The Voice of the Earth

In the field: process and transformation.

Frog spawn is its own galaxy, its own constellation.


WHAT SORT OF BODY?

What sort of body?
     The world-body
         the cosmic-body
the pre-fab body
    the shrink-wrapped body?

The tidal body, the river-body,
    the body that flows and
flows, down from the hills,
    into the sea, into the ocean?

The oceanic body?
Yes.
The oceanic body.

Not the over-clothed body,
    but the naked body,
the water-body,
    not the ornamented body, or
the product-body
     branded with value, branded with markings,
but the elemental body, eroded by lashings,
     by torrential and nirvanic thrashings:

The solar body, the stellar body, the galactic body -
constellated and considered -
the subject body, living, breathing, relating,

the open body, the every body
not limited to the tenuous envelope of skin and skull.

The rainbow body?
Yes.
The rainbow body.