Selfhood and Authenticity by Corey Anton

Author:Corey Anton [Anton, Corey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-31T03:18:00+00:00

Let me now turn to those who overstate the case. There has been a tendency in later twentieth-century theorizing to overclaim the powers of speech practices, to overstate their capabilities to "construct" reality. Here we find what M. C. Dillon (1988; 1995) has aptly called, "semiological reductionism." Those who would overstate the case can be found engaging in linguistically reductive social constructionisms (e.g., Lyotard's [ 1984] postmodern reduction of Wittgenstein's "life-forms" to "language games"). Some thinkers have suggested "There is nothing outside the text," (Derrida, 1974, p. 158) while others have argued that "Being that can he understood is language" (Gadamer, 1975, p. 474). Others still suggest that we now live in a "hyperreality," where "the real" is only that which can he "represented" (Baudrillard, 1983). Stewart (1996) too, for all his trenchant insights regarding those who understate the case, seems to fall into overstating it, as if all human meaning is furnished by and in language practices. His project thus underaddresses the ontological conditions of temporality and spatiality (reducing them to products of articulate contact) and moreover, seems to underplay the lived-body's other indigenous powers for understanding (Anton, 1999).

Those who overstate the case seem to suggest that speech provides nothing but reification and that this is reality. Embodiment, temporality, spatiality are but reified typifications and so are artifacts, products, of speech practices. This also can be said of all order and distinction: these are imposed by humans. The claim, then, is that "nature hath no joints nor seams of its own," but instead, language itself creates the divisions (Rorty, 1979; Bochner, 1985). Now, it may be somewhat true that speech "constitutes" reality," and it is quite clear that talk can reify "things" as seemingly independent of us ]and] our various intentional activities. But, it is also the case that "It's more complicated than that" (Burke, 1961, p. 227). In fact, the exact same reifying (or in my terms, existentially decompressing) tendencies can be found to characterize all of the lived-body's intentional powers. With regard to the phenomenal fields presenced by the various intentional threads, I already suggested that "nothing separates any object from its background." I will return to this later.

I suggested in Chapter 2 that to all intentional threads there is an intending, an intended, and an intendableness. For example, when I look to some object, say the pen in my right hand, there is an act of seeing, a thing seen, and the very seeableness of the pen. Or, closing my eyes, I can run my hand along the pen. Here we find the act of touching, the thing touched, and the touchableness of the pen. Notice that the thing seen and the thing touched are the same thing, only it is presented or manifested differently according to the understanding given to the different manners of making contact. The different profiles, the different livedthrough world-experiences, are differences in intendableness, and thus, in talking about the pen, we likewise find the same triadic structure: there is the speaking, the thing spoken of, and the speakableness.

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