Help
Sign In
RSS Feed
|
David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 16, 9:25 AM: |
||
|
I recently have begun reading The Opening of Vision, by David Michael Levin. I am finding his work very relevant to my own explorations of post-metaphysical spirituality, touching on many of the themes we have explored in this group. I first learned of his name from an essay in a TSK book; in it, he did an inter-textual study of TSK and Merleau-Ponty, juxtaposing various excerpts from both traditions to allow them to illuminate each other. |
|||
Permalink
Print
Email
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 16, 9:30 AM: |
||
|
And here is a tapestry of excerpts from The Body's Recollection of Being, by |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 16, 12:02 PM: |
||
|
Just skimming around in The Opening of Vision, there are a couple sections that may be of interest. In this section (as well as elsewhere), Levin talks about poetizing discourse and contrasts it with a metaphysical, propositional discourse. And in this one, he provides a phenomenological account of his experience in a Dzogchen dark retreat. |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 16, 9:28 PM: |
||
|
Edward, if you're following this thread, you might find this section (pages 47-49) interesting. He traces out a developmental schema which parallels some of your recent reflections here, where (among other things) higher development involves a return and recovery of earlier stages of embodied cognition. |
|||
|
Re: David Michael Levintheurj said Apr 17, 8:23 AM: |
||
|
Yes, I’m following and enjoying Levin quite a bit. Pp. 47-9 particularly reinforced and expanded upon my own nebulous speculations. Levin might go a long way toward elucidating what you’re trying to do with this pod. And finally allowing me to understand, and agree with, Dzogchen (miracle or miracles!). And allowing me to finally find a way, with Jackson, to return to a ritual practice that does not necessarily have to buy into the metaphysical foundations upon which it was built. |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael Levintheurj said Apr 17, 8:42 AM: |
||
|
Notice that one requires an ego to start the process of integrating what came before: |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 17, 8:56 AM: |
||
|
The comments I've seen from him are appreciative – e.g., “As Derrida has shown us…” I'll look and see if I can find some quotes. |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael Levintheurj said Apr 17, 9:09 AM: |
||
|
Recall from p. 243 that Levin says that Derrida did not recognize, or at least was silent about, Heidegger’s third sense of presence in Gelassenheit, Anwesenheit. I’m not so sure about that. It seems to me Derrida’s extensive commentary on khora and messianicity deals exactly with this sense of the “impossible” within presence, his version of a hermeneutical phenomenology. |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael Levintheurj said Apr 17, 9:24 AM: |
||
|
This also makes sense of the two truths debate between Gorampa and Tsongkhapa when it comes to conceptual elaboration. Recall that for T conceptual and nonconceptual, as well as samsara and nirvana, nonduality and duality, are mutually entailing. In Levin’s context this means that even when we go to levels (4) and (5), even when we integrate (1) and (2)’s sense of the nonconceptual, we still retain the conceptual duality of (3) and its many useful functions. We don’t have to eliminate (or suspend, or quiet) (3) for “enlightenment” but rather it is a necessary prerequisite of, and ingredient that continues afterward as part of, the “spiritual.” There is no I-I without I! |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 17, 1:40 PM: |
||
|
Edward, yes, I'd be happy to loan the book to you. It's thick, and I'm quite busy with work, so it will probably take me a little while to get through it; but I wouldn't mind renewing it and loaning it to you. But, given my own interests and the intersection I'm finding in Levin's work with “post-metaphysics,” the TSK vision, and Dzogchen (among other pet topics), I'm thinking I might invest in his whole “trilogy” so I can spend more time studying them. In that case, too, I'd be happy to loan them to you. I'll let you know if I purchase them. |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael Levintheurj said Apr 22, 10:38 AM: |
||
|
Since I have to use a library for internet access while out of town I looked up the pre-trans fallacy chapter in Eye to Eye (Shambhala, 1996). On p. 237 figure 7 sums up the inverse relationshipe between pre and trans “levels.” Recall this is well prior to the WC lattice, which no longer has the “states” above the levels. Nonetheless the figure has 8 levels: 1 = primary matrix; 2 = body; 3 = magic; 4 = mythic; 5 = ego ming; 6 = bodymind; 7 = psychic; 8 = archetype (subtle); 9 = spirit (causal to nondual). According to Wilber 1 and 9 are inversely related, as are 2 & 6, 3 & 7, 4 & 8. The figure is also in the shape of an inverted V, with 1 at the bottom moving up to the apex at 5, then downward to 9. This does not exactly match up with my regression in exact inverse order during the process of meditative state training, but I think the case I've made with the brain research might lend more weight to my hypthesis than Wilber's figure 7, which originally appeared in 1983 I think? Nonetheless, Wilber's intution about these relationships might be explained more postmetaphysically within the WC lattice. |
|||
|
Re: David Michael LevinMark said Apr 18, 8:40 AM: |
||
|
“Reading that section, I am reminded not only of a number of the themes |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinMark said Apr 18, 9:09 AM: |
||
|
“May the boundless knowledge that time presents and space allows illuminate the native perspectives of your original face.” ~ Balder  |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 19, 9:54 PM: |
||
|
LOL. Thank you, Mark. I'll come pay a visit soon to Media Home Server. |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinMark said Apr 19, 10:37 PM: |
||
|
Great Bruce. |
|||
|
Re: David Michael LevinNickeson said Apr 21, 6:20 PM: |
||
|
Notes on Levin: |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 21, 10:37 PM: |
||
|
Thanks, Nickeson. Anytime some appreciation is being shown for something, we can count on you to drop by, piss on it, and then do your own dance. |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinNickeson said Apr 22, 7:28 AM: |
||
|
Balder, |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 22, 7:54 AM: |
||
|
Hi, Nickeson, |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Apr 23, 9:25 AM: |
||
|
The following is an article from 1995, so it's a little dated, but still worth including here.
Changing Interpretations of the Body A concern for the nature of the body is at the very heart of medicine—consequently, the history of medicine calls for an interpretation that sheds light on the history of the body. Such an interpretation, ideally, would bring out essential correspondences between evolving conceptions of the body and progressive conceptions of disease and healing. This article presents six parameters for interpreting the history of the body as it figured in the history of medical research. I shall concentrate on the advances that distinguish the medicine of the “classical age” from the medicine which began, broadly speaking, in the seventeenth century, and which I call “early modem”. But as well as highlighting the limitations of late modem medicine, I will also touch on some very recent advances—new ways of thinking that begin to define what could be called a “postmodem” medicine. The following parameters represent not so much dichotomies or dualities but something more like a dialectic or stages of a spiraling progression. As the meaning of the body changes through time, the movement of understanding in each case is toward integration and a transcending synthesis of each pair of parameters. In each case, a new perspective is emerging, forming the basis for a new, postmodern, discourse in medicine. (1) From abstraction to concreteness. The body recognized by medicine in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance was an abstract construct, an idealized projection of speculative reason, an entity the nature of which was reduced to the logic of an intelligible form. During this period “classical medicine” did not directly took at, nor did it really see, concrete, individual bodies. What it saw, in fact, were confirmations or deviations from disease classifications described in its authoritative texts. It is as if medicine looked at bodies “sideways”, making only occasional glances that turned away from the established texts. However, in the seventeenth century, at the beginning of the modem age, medicine began to think of itself as an empirical science, and it began to insist on the need to understand disease concretely by examining individual bodies. But in the final analysis, what we take to be “concreteness” is only a product of interpretation. Today, as we near the end of the twentieth century (late modernity), medicine is beginning to realize that the “concreteness” of its mechanistic paradigm is not an ultimate truth and that, just as classical medicine projected an interpretive abstraction onto the concrete, lived-in, body, so, analogously, has late modem medicine. —Postmodern medicine is consequently groping toward a new, more adequate concreteness—consistent with the fact that the patient's body is always the site of meaningful experience. (2) From exteriority to interiority. The body of classical medicine was a very subtle body of humors and dispositions; but the perception of its “nature” conformed more to pre-established classifications than to the truth of its observable condition. By contrast, when, in the early modern period, physicians started really to look at the body, what at first they saw was a gross mechanical body, dense and opaque. The body of early modern medicine was seen as an extremely intricate machine, and it was examined, for the most part, from a very detached, external standpoint. The opening up of cadavers for research and learning was therefore emblematic of a revolutionary change in the way medicine began to look at the body. The once sacred body, surrounded by cultural taboos, suddenly became a worldly machine, a matter of interiority, a profane flesh to be seen into and seen through, a presence conceived as if its mechanisms would eventually be transparent for technological knowledge. —However, late modern medicine has penetrated so deeply into the invisible interiority of the flesh that it has begun to abolish the notion of a boundary separating the body's exterior and interior reality. Body and environment are not only inseparable, they are in continuous interaction, and in continuous interdependence. Current research into the logic of the body's immune processes has already signaled the beginning of a postmodern discourse. (3) From qualities to causalities. Classical medicine (influenced by early Greek philosopher-physicians such as Hippocrates in the fourth century BCE) thought of the body as an association of qualities, a substance timelessly qualified by its various states and conditions. By contrast, anatomical pathology initially promised the possibility of penetrating the density of the flesh and finding “first causes” for all diseases. However, as late modern medicine has strictly followed out the logic of its explanatory models, it has increasingly found them inadequate. The very precision of its principle of causal agency, the very power of its explanatory work—and, subsequently, the very successes it celebrated in understanding and controlling diseases caused by bacterial infections—has enabled it to continue revising the simple concept of agency. Now this principle can be given up. Medical knowledge has advanced far enough to conceive a postmodern alternative. Better models were eventually found. In responding to virus epidemiology, late modem medicine has finally been able to reconceptualize the principle of simple agency in the language of host environments, communicative systems, interactive fields, local economies, and planetary ecologies.3 Ultimately, the infectious cultures of biology and epidemiology cannot be isolated from their larger social and political cultures, and so causal explanations cannot be confined to the activities of isolated agents. For modern medicine, the body exists in time and space, a continuous succession of physical states, conditions medicine has long attempted to explain by a causality of spatiotemporal proximities. —But late modern medicine is increasingly finding itself compelled to abandon its model of simple causes and to work out a new model of multifactoral influence: a model for which the network, rather than the straight arrow, might be an appropriate symbol. (4) From states to processes. Early modern medicine abolished the old Aristotelian logic of qualities and set out to understand how the body it was looking at actually works. In its earliest phase, it saw structures and it submitted the body to structural differentiation, concentrating on describing its structural complexity (for example, the layout of the organs). This structuralism may be characterized by saying that late modern medicine increasingly attended to the body's functional complexity and differentiation. By pushing this mechanistic research program to its limits, however, late modern medicine has recently begun to move to a postmodem discourse (a way of thinking and talking about medicine) which can recognize both states and systemic processes. Even so, it should be noted that such a discourse has not yet abandoned an essentially mechanistic way of thinking—and that, in point of fact, very little systems-theoretical thinking in medicine has as yet been driven by the logic of its research to give up the powerful resources of mechanism. I am not proposing here the total abandonment of mechanistic thinking. However, (a) we must take care not to blur the essential distinction between mechanistic and non-mechanistic models, and (b) we must acknowledge that almost all systems-theory discourse today is still operating within the mechanistic paradigm that has prevailed since the beginning of modernity in the seventeenth century. Moreover, (c) we should continue to work with this paradigm, pushing it to its limits and seeing how far we can proceed by its light. This is the only way we have to get beyond it. —Nevertheless, (d) we should also at the same time bold ourselves open to alternative possibilities, exploring, in particular, the possibility of systems-models which are not based on mechanistic principles. (5) From analysis to holism. Whereas classical medicine conceptualized the body as an organic whole, but only abstractly, and only in terms of a pre-established system of categories, modem medicine (in both its early and its late phases) has conceptualized the body more concretely and empirically, but also more mechanistically and more analytically, as a totality of discretely functioning parts. —However, finally able to take up the organicism circulating in cultural discourse since the late nineteenth century, recent medicine has been laboring to use its analytic knowledge as a basis for understanding the body, once again, in more systemic terms, and as an organic whole. The age of postmodern medicine may be said to begin with a theoretical and clinical commitment to the process-holism of systemic understanding. (6) From mechanical isolation to systemic integration. Whereas classical medicine thought of the body as an instance of the sacred whole, a register of the cosmological order, early modern medicine could only begin to understand the body empirically and concretely by making it totally profane —reducing it to a mechanism isolated from the surrounding world: something essentially, or virtually, self-contained and self-sufficient. Recently, however, late modem medicine has begun to restore the body to the larger world-order. With increasing success, it has tried to see the body as a self-regulatory system whose functioning is dependent on, and inseparable from, the larger world, and which consequently can exist only in continuous, psychologically mediated interaction with a complex field of social, cultural, historical, and environmental conditions. Working with this model of the body, late modern medicine has increasingly recognized diseases as meaningful epidemiological processes belonging to distinctive life-world “economies”. —Thus, research programs in epidemiology are now coming together with research programs in the logic of endocrine and immune processes to establish the need for a postmodern medicine capable of understanding the body in all the dimensions of its systemic integration. Seven Models of the Body Each of the previous parameters can serve as guides for assessing how conceptions of the body have progressively changed through time. This progression demonstrates the historically indisputable power of mechanistic and analytic thinking. But the evolutionary implications of mechanistic models and analytic logic have now been followed out to a point where their inherent limitations are finally becoming apparent. Present research suggests that the future of medicine requires a different logic: a new direction in thinking which is more organic and integrative. The historical progression points in the direction of a fundamental paradigm-shift.4 To understand the significance of this change and to sense the new direction it implies, the history of medicine may usefully be conceptualized by reference to a succession of “bodies”. If it is possible to speak of an evolutionary logic, a history marked along the way by paradigm-shifts in models of the body, perhaps the seven models proposed in the remainder of this article will contribute to our understanding of the history of modern and contemporary medicine. (i) The rational body. The body we find represented in the discourse of classical medicine was essentially a rational body, a body pictured in conformity to an aesthetic of rational intelligibility, a sacred and universal body replicating the larger cosmology. (ii) The anatomical body. By contrast, the body which emerged in the clinical and discursive practices of early modern medicine was essentially an anatomical body, a body understood in purely structural terms, a body of organs, displaying the sites for the ancient theory of humours. (iii) The physiological body. Increasingly, though, as knowledge dared to penetrate the veil of the skin and explore the interior it conceals, the body which figured in medical discourse was a physiological body, a body-machine whose structures were seen as mechanisms, and required mechanical explanations of their functions. (iv) The biochemical body of cells and molecules. Making use of old and new technology, analytic medicine began to invade the invisible nature of the flesh, looking with a microscopic eye into the most minute structures of the skin, the musculature, and the organs, and accordingly representing the body as an intricate network of tissues. Yielding to even deeper, and even more analytic, more atomic methods of probing, the body of tissues disclosed itself to be a differentiated cellular body, ultimately analyzable into molecular interactions. Because late modern medicine has faithfully and relentlessly followed out the logic of its analytic, atomic method, and new techniques of research have made possible even more subtle forms of analysis, the body of cells was in its turn disclosed as a gross body, concealing a body of much more subtle nature: a body of biochemical processes. The breakthrough to this dimension brings us into the present. It represents a great achievement—and discloses the latest implications—of analytical medicine, the research program whose mechanistic logic has governed medicine ever since the seventeenth century. (v) The psychosomatic body. In the early years of this century, however, psychosomatic medicine, encouraged by the contributions of psychoanalysis to our understanding of hysterical conversions, introduced a representation of the body which, for the first time, attempted— albeit with only limited conceptual resources—to break away from the analytic methodology, to break out of mechanism, to break through the ontology of distinct minds and bodies, and to think of the body of medicine in a radically new way. However, one limitation that has hobbled psychosomatic discourse comes from the fact that, while advocating the unity of mind and body, it has failed to overcome the dualism which isolated this unity from its environments nature, society, and culture. There is, also, a second and more fundamental limitation, which comes from the fact that it has not sustained the courage of its original intuitive conviction: It talks boldly about a psycho-somatic whole, but it limits the conceptual reference of “psychosomatic” to a very small range of cases and instances. If what we have been calling “mind” and “body” are really one, then all diseases, without exception, are and must be “psychosomatic”. But the discourse of psychosomatic medicine has never been prepared to support such a radical and consequential thesis. It has required a new generation, and a new discursive formation to conceptualize and demonstrate this point. Only now, with the development of psychoneuroimmunology, can the science of medicine begin to represent the body as a psychosomatic unity integrated into its environments, and begin to articulate the networks of causal correlations implied by this representation. (vi) The body of psychoneuroimmunology. (See sidebar below) Now, as we approach the beginning of a new century, revolutionary research into the logic of immunocompetence is realizing the vision inaugurated by psychosomatic medicine, making visible a body of extraordinarily subtle functions and processes. This dynamic, synergic body is seen as a system functioning in a larger system, a multifactoral network of causes and effects, in which effects can also become causes. This body cannot be represented as a “substance”. It has become necessary to represent it, rather, as a system of organized processes, intercommunicating and functioning at different levels of differentiation and integration. A growing body of evidence supports a new concept of disease and a much broadened understanding of epidemiology, according to which diseases do not take place in an environment conditioned only by the forces of nature, but occur, rather, in a field of communication—a world of social, cultural and historical influences and meanings. Thus, epidemiologists and immunologists are beginning to understand that the individual body is also a social body, and is therefore inseparable from the social and cultural life of populations. (vii) The body of experienced meaning. Psychoneuroimmunological research represents a growing body of evidence pointing to the day when medicine will be able to understand how the diseases afflicting us, as well as the body's processes of healing, are sensitive to the effects of bodily experienced meaning, and how, more generally, processes of disease and healing are correlated with experienced meanings. The body which would correspond to this achievement is the body of psychoneuroendocrinology: the body now being brought to light by neurological, immunological and epidemiological research—the first medical body subtle enough to promise the possibility of testable correlations with the phenomenological body of experienced meanings. For the first time, medicine is equipped with a discourse capable of formulating very specific correlations between (a) the patient's bodily experienced meanings and (b) conditions or states of the medical body, the body which figures in the research and clinical practices of medicine. However, it must be noted that medicine's success in making such correlations does not depend only on advances in medical knowledge. It also depends on the ability of patients to fine-tune their embodied awareness, their sensitivity to processes of bodily experiencing, and their skillfulness in carrying those processes forward into more articulate, more discriminating meanings. For many centuries, Western culture has denied recognition to this ability and consequently made it very difficult for people to enjoy contacting and working with their body's felt meanings the intricate meanings carried by their bodies in co-responsiveness to particular situations and circumstances. At long last, however, our culture has begun to recognize, to legitimate, and to facilitate this natural skill. As experienced-meaning processes become more subtle, more intricate, more discerning, it is reasonable to expect that there will be an increasing convergence between the body of medicine and the body of lived experience, due as much to the learning of this skillfulness in articulating bodily-felt meanings as to the achievements of systemic, postmodern medicine. The Body of Lived Experience To sum up: the convergence between the body of medicine and the body of experience will be greatly enhanced by a recognition that the human body is more than a biological organism, more than a physical substance—that is, it is also, in short, a “discursive formation”. It is inherently organized in terms of intercommunicating processes, and it is shaped or formed by the evolving historical interpretations with which it interacts. For medicine, the recognition of the body as a “discursive formation” means (a) that it relinquishes the epistemological assumption of naive realism (the assumption that its concepts are observer—neutral and correspond to a totally independent, objective reality); (b) that it comes to terms with its status as a hermeneutical (an interpretive) science; and (c) that its relation to the entity it calls “the body” is mediated by a network of historical assumptions and representations which are never more than provisional and tentative, and remain always open to reassessment. By the same token, insofar as patients themselves begin to understand their bodies in this new way, they too will be freed from counterproductive conceptions of the body and may begin to realize the extent to which the body that they present to medicine for diagnosis and treatment is a body of meaningful experience, a body of significant intelligence, inherently informed about itself, a body the very nature of which can be profoundly changed by virtue of each patient's sensitivity and embodied awareness, and his/her own skillfulness in articulating the body's carried meanings.6 |
|||
|
|
Levin on Hermeneutical VisionBalder said May 28, 1:46 PM: |
||
|
The seer is, as Heidegger says, exceptional; and what makes the seer's gaze 'exceptional' is precisely the fact that it is neither instrumental nor detached, neither a gaze which sees things in terms of their Zuhandensein (readiness-to-hand), nor a gaze of 'pure seeing,' a seeing of things as Vorhandensein (presence-at-hand), which posits things…as 'sheer perceptual presence,' a 'simple sensory presence of the living present'…
This means that we must also attempt to think aletheia free of the metaphysics of ego-subjects and their objects – a metaphysics which installs them in the objectivity of a linear, serial time order, composed of a succession of self-contained, externally related 'nows.' The seer's vision is 'exceptional' in this regard, for the seer is one who has achieved a certain freedom from this way of thinking and seeing… I agree with Heidegger [that] the 'essence' of our being is to exist as an 'ecstatic inherence in the truth of Being.' But what does this mean in terms of our vision? The sense of 'truth,' here, is of course aletheia. Aletheia is an experience with truth that is radially open to the presencing of the absent, the invisible: it is, in this sense, ecstatic. By contrast, correctness involves an experience with truth that sees it as a posited state; it is a vision of truth which denies shadows, adumbrations, the presencing of the invisible, and unconcealment. It recognizes only two modes of being: Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein – in other words, it can only see totalized presence. The seer's way of seeing is hermeneutical: hermeneutically circumspective. Instead of seeing things one-dimensionally, as most of us do today, in this age of reductionism, his gaze sees things in terms of a hermeneutical 'as.' Just as there are two modes of discourse – the apophantic and the hermeneutical, the assertive and the disclosive, so there are two modes of vision, describable in similar terms. Here is Heidegger's discussion of the different discursive modes in Being and Time:
We should note that Heidegger himself implies the homology between vision and discourse by giving an account of the discourse of the language of vision. Heidegger's analysis continues:
Likewise, the seer's way of seeing things is more primordial than our everyday way: its ecstatic openness, and its corresponding sense of things in the dimensionality of their wholeness, though not understood, and not consciously practiced, by more 'ordinary' mortals, in fact underlies all human perception, and not only that of the seer. This is what I think Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological explorations of perception and its temporality enable us to appreciate. Since the seer's capacity for openness is crucial, here, for our understanding of aletheia as an experience with vision, we must briefly return to the fact that the seer's gaze is not ego-logical. That is to say, it is neither egocentric nor logocentric. As a spiritually developed being, the seer is a self, not an ego. The difference is important, so I will briefly define it. The ego is the self limited to its social identifications: its roles, practices, and socially adaptive routines. The ego is the active pole in a structure of subject and object. The self, however, is not identified with any one structure; structurally speaking, it is a process always open to further structuring. even when the self functions like an ego, it is not totally identified with it. The self is a sense of living in which all identifications are subject to deconstruction. Thus we may say that there is no self in the sense of a substance, a fixed identity, and a rigid closure to processes of change. Instead, there are only different styles, types, and dimensions of experiencing – and different styles, types, and dimensions of integration, unity and coherence. With the emergence of the ego, there is an inevitable agitation of mind: anxieties and tensions determine the shaping of our visual intentionalities; inveterate tendencies prevail, structuring the field of our vision in very rigid, narrow, and restricted ways. Ego-logical vision, an assertive mode of vision, always tends to follow the straight line of desire, the shortest, most direct distance between subject and object. For such a vision, a 'circumspective' experience with aletheia is not possible. Ego-logical vision is adaptively necessary, of course. Without its conformity to 'objective' truth, its relationship to correctness, we mortals could not survive. The ego-logical gaze constitutes the ground of our experience with truth – truth, that is, as correspondence. But the seer has achieved a different vision, and he enjoys a different experience with truth. Without rejecting the ego-logical experience of vision and its corresponding truth, he has chosen to develop his visionary capacities beyond their ego-logical stage. To see aletheically, i.e., to experience aletheia in vision, the seer must learn first of all to relax, to lessen the grip of normal anxieties and tensions. This relaxation will in turn alter the character of her visual intentionality, allowing new and very different tendencies to come into play, and restructuring the visual process, the formation of the visual Gestalt – the figure/ground, center/periphery, focus/diffusion relationships. Without the control, the constant, obsessive monitoring of the ego, the seer's gaze is radically decentered, centered in a calm, more restful, more receptive relationship to the openness of the visual field as a whole. The openness, this visual clearing, is what makes the seer's gaze 'ecstatic' … As Heinz Kohut, American psychoanalyst, once observed, 'Joy relates to experiences of the total self': that is to say, it is both 'cause' and 'effect' of a process of self-development, and is related, in particular, to the self's journey towards an openness that would make it whole. The seer's vision, a vision of the 'essential richness of Being,' is rooted in a joyful experience of living in a 'forgetting' release of the past and an openness to the future. The seer is one who embraces whatever time has to offer. It is not that he knows the future, in a predictive or prophetic sense, although mystification often understands the visionary capacity in this way, but rather that he has developed a deep understanding of our protentional-retentional structuring of time – the structural intertwining of temporal ecstasies – and overcome the psychopathology of egologically centered time-experience. Living thus, the seer's vision is centered in a felt sense of the whole – a felt gathering of time as a whole. The seer has 'already seen' what is yet to happen because she understands the ecstatic intertwining, is free of pathological relationships to time, and is open to whatever may come to pass in the dimensions of the visible. ~ Levin, The Opening of Vision, pp. 460-465 (excerpts) |
|||
|
|
Re: Levin on Hermeneutical Visiontheurj said May 28, 5:30 PM: |
||
|
In a more recent book Levin says the following, from Sites of Vision (MIT press, 1999). Aside from the usual logocentric misreading of Derrida it’s not half bad: |
|||
|
|
Re: Levin on Hermeneutical VisionMark said May 28, 5:46 PM: |
||
|
i think i'm gettin' a handle on this promotion business… |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Jun 2, 11:58 AM: |
||
|
I found a full text by Levin on the web: |
|||
|
|
Re: David Michael LevinBalder said Jun 5, 8:14 AM: |
||
|
Another excerpt from The Philosopher's Gaze: |
|||
