This paper explores the ethical insights provided by Anne Truitt's minimalist sculptures, as viewed through the phenomenological lenses of Hannah Arendt's investigations into the co-constitution of reality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's investigations into perception. Artworks in their material presence can lay out new ways of relating and perceiving. Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality. Merleau-Ponty shows how our prereflective (...) bodies allow incompossible perceptions to coexist. Yet this same capacity of bodies to gather multiple perceptions together also lends itself to the illusion that we see from only one perspective. If an ethical perspective becomes reified into one position, it then becomes detached from reality, and the ethical potential is actually lost. At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings. An ethics that does not take embodied relations into account—that allows for only one perspective—ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, and for being part of a common and shared reality. (shrink)

In this paper1 I shall present not just the conscience of Huckleberry Finn but two others as well. One of them is the conscience of Heinrich Himmler. He became a Nazi in 1923; he served drably and quietly, but well, and was rewarded with increasing responsibility and power. At the peak of his career he held many offices and commands, of which the most powerful was that of leader of the S.S. - the principal police force of the Nazi regime. (...) In this capacity, Himmler commanded the whole concentration-camp system, and was responsible for the execution of the so-called ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’. It is important for my purposes that this piece of social engineering should be thought of not abstractly but in concrete terms of Jewish families being marched to what they think are bath-houses, to the accompaniment of loud-speaker renditions of extracts from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffman, there to be choked to death by poisonous gases. Altogether, Himmler succeeded in murdering about four and a half million of them, as well as several million gentiles, mainly Poles and Russians. The other conscience to be discussed is that of the Calvinist theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards. He lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, and has a good claim to be considered America’s first serious and considerable philosophical thinker. He was for many years a widely-renowned preacher and Congregationalist minister in New England; in 1748 a dispute with his congregation led him to resign (he couldn’t accept their view that unbelievers should be admitted to the Lord’s Supper in the hope that it would convert them); for some years after that he worked as a missionary, preaching to Indians through an interpreter;, then in 1758 he accepted the presidency of what is now Princeton University, and within two months died from a smallpox inoculation. Along the way he wrote some first-rate philosophy: his book attacking the notion of free will is still sometimes read.. (shrink)

This paper studies the role of faces in animal life to gain insight into Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, especially his later ontology. The relation between animal faces and moving, animal bodies involves a peculiar, expressive logic. This logic echoes the physiognomic structure of perception that Merleau-Ponty detects in his earlier philosophy, and exemplifies and clarifies a logic elemental to his later ontology, especially to his concept of an invisible that is of (endogenous to) the visible. The question why the logic of the (...) face can manifest this analogy or homology with the logic of perception and ontology is treated through a study of embryology, which suggests that the logic of the face ramifies a deeper logic of being. Methodologically, the face is taken as something like a lens into the onto-logic of being. This lens suggests that what underlies Merleau-Ponty's later ontology is a logic of animality. (shrink)

This essay outlines how Western culture, and in particular the practice of architecture, has failed to develop a nuanced and ethical approach to alterity. It examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of the flesh as a process of continual self-interrogation through perceptual acts that intertwine communality and difference, establishing a shared world through interlocution, and explores how the work of Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray augment each other to deepen our understanding of alterity. It then examines architectural design as an intercorporeal and intersubjective (...) act that creatively refigures sedimented spatial and social habits. Using the example of an architectural design studio, it demonstrates how designers can critically confront nuances of alterity through investigating the corporeal and social depths of architecture. (shrink)

The everyday experience of someone, or something, getting in one’s face reveals a depth that is the difference between a world that is intrusive and a world that is respectful. This depth, I argue, should be conceived, not in feet and inches, but in terms of violation and honor. I explore three factors that contribute to this depth’s emergence. First, I examine our body’s capacity, at the level of sense experience, for giving the world a figure/ground structure; this structure insures (...) that most of the world we are in constant contact with, nonetheless, keeps its distance as background. I demonstrate the importance of this figure/ground structure to the depth of our world by considering the experience of people with autism; for those with autism, this structure seems to be, if not entirely missing, at least substantially less robust than our own. Next, I examine our body’s ability, at the level of more personal experience, to handle the world; our handling of the world, which rests on the acquisition of specific skills, transforms things that could easily assault us into the usually motionless objects we tend to take for granted. I demonstrate the importance of these skills to the depth of our world by considering the experience of Gregg Mozgalla; until recently, Mozgalla, who has cerebral palsy, could only lurch, rather than walk, through the world. Finally, I draw on the work of the artist Mierle Ukeles to examine the maintenance work that other people, at a broader social level, perform; other’s maintenance work keeps in good condition a world that, by falling into bad condition, could easily intrude on us. (shrink)

This is a study of the way in which Levinas approaches the experience of human expression from two perspectives: firstly, as a pre-thematic or pre-cognitive “experience,” which requires that he revisit Husserl's pre-objective intentionality and explore the relationship between the upsurge of sensation and its “intentionalization” as consciousness self-temporalizing. Thereafter, Levinas must contend with the implications of his own writing, which includes his claims for the face. This implies that he must grapple with criticism to the effect that he is (...) providing a hermeneutics of face-to-face encounters. Levinas acknowledges that his writing is a “dramatique des phénomènes” and not a phenomenology of actions. How, then, to avoid charges of arbitrary description? How to step outside the primordiality of “the phrase” or the conceptualization that threatens claims to “pure” phenomenology? This is really what is at stake in Levinas's second great work. In this essay, I explore the role that “substitution” plays in weaving together conceptuality and phenomenality. I contrast this with other forms of “dramatization,” from narrative witnessing, to minimalist sculpture. (shrink)

This paper studies the role of faces in animal life to gain insight into Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, especially his later ontology. The relation between animal faces and moving, animal bodies involves a peculiar, expressive logic. This logic echoes the physiognomic structure of perception that Merleau-Ponty detects in his earlier philosophy, and exemplifies and clarifies a logic elemental to his later ontology, especially to his concept of an invisible that is of the visible. The question why the logic of the face can (...) manifest this analogy or homology with the logic of perception and ontology is treated through a study of embryology, which suggests that the logic of the face ramifies a deeper logic of being. Methodologically, the face is taken as something like a lens into the onto-logic of being. This lens suggests that what underlies Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology is a logic of animality. (shrink)