M401

Ontological reciprocity

In Art and Embodiment. From Aesthetics to Self-consciousness, Paul Crowther discusses art from a philosophical and phenomenological point of view as a ‘need’ of self-consciousness.  Phenomenology is a mode of enquiry that understands human embodiment as the source of all knowledge of reality, and believes that knowledge of objects and events that exist in human consciousness are entirely formed through sensory perception and experience.  Phenomenology opposes speculative thinking about unobservable matters.

Crowther’s description of the human phenomenological position in the world builds on the views of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  He uses the term ‘ontological reciprocity’ to describe the way in which self and world are each created through the unified field of human sensory and perceptual interactions with the ‘other'.  In Crowther’s words ‘The unity of this field, and the consciousness of self emergent from it, is both stimulated by, and enables us to organise, the spatio-temporal diversity of otherness’.[i]  We do not ‘gaze out of ourselves’ on the world, but rather ‘inhere in it in the sensible’.[ii]   Our senses operate as a unified field, allowing the individual to perceive a self as unified, and the world as other.  What we find in the world affects us at a sensory and experiential level, influences how we perceive the world, and determines how we perceive ourselves and our capabilities.  Simultaneously we act upon the world, altering it and interacting with otherness, but through the lens of our individual and cultural understanding of ourselves and that other.  The embodied subject’s position in this reciprocity is informed not only by present sensory experience, but also by non-immediate experience including the past, future, physical, ideological and moral (cultural) situation. [iii]

The human subject, Crowther says, is engaged in constant reciprocal interaction with other things, because consciousness can never fully grasp the world.  There is always more, because everything is in constant flux, including our own temporality and perceptual point of view. Concerning the sensory field he writes that the ‘inseparable unity’ of the embodied subject is due to our reciprocity being ‘pre-reflective’.[iv] We view the world through the unifying action of an embodied consciousness, and do not consciously separate the varied sensual factors of our experience.  The removal of any sensory element from an experience would make it a different one.  Philosophical analysis of embodied experience therefore does violence to the experience by dismembering it in language.  Art, Crowther believes, is the closest one can get to an expression in pre-reflective form due to its multi modal nature.  Art therefore provides a more complete representation of human experience.  This is not to say that art is an accurate and complete representation of experience; there is after all always ‘more’.  But it does less violence than analytical language, due to its multimodal and simultaneous symbolic possibilities, and its conservation of the ‘pre-reflective’ aspects of our ontological reciprocity.  Art, Crowther writes, ‘is the making of symbolically significant form out of, or into, sensuous manifolds’.  The process of making ‘involves an internal relation between the existence of a specific artist or artistic ensemble, and the resulting artefact’.[v]  This fits comfortably with Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object and potential space.

To say that art gives us access to the embodied experience of other conscious subjects does not explain why art should be considered a need of consciousness, however.  Crowther justifies this claim through the concept of human ‘ecology’, which he defines as the interaction of the organism with its environment.  The concept of ecology normally indicates a material or physical interaction of organisms in and with the world, but in the case of humans our needs of the environment include psychological needs, so that human interactions with the world also include the psychological.  Satisfactory human ecology therefore includes satisfaction of human consciousness needs, to achieve a balanced and harmonious relationship of consciousness with the world.  We need, writes Crowther, to see our inner life reflected and acknowledged by otherness.  We need to recognise others and receive recognition in return to realise a satisfactory sense of self.  The concept of ontological reciprocity of consciousness therefore requires the self to be externalised, through the making of artefacts or the completion of projects; which closely supports the philosophy of occupation, health and justice as discussed elsewhere on this site.  He accommodates the current Post-modern dislike of universalising statements by adding that although various aspects of being may be historically subject to change, human ‘being’, is structured around biological constants; ‘ontological reciprocity is the root condition of being human’.[vi]  He writes that if ‘certain kinds of artefacts fulfil these needs’ we should consider them of ‘universal significance in the ecology of human experience’ and therefore consider art to be a need of human consciousness.

Pre-reflective

Idealistic Hyperbole

In The Library