Oldal 93 [93]
OCR
What must I do (and why me)? |91 organism that desires but desire that “organises” the manifestations of life. Desire arises in us at the call of something that motivates the experience from the outside. The name of this something is for MerleauPonty — and Emmanuel Lévinas — the i/ y a, something which is without even being something. I would therefore translate it as Being there (referring to the apparent creation by the French philosophers of the counter-concept of the Heideggerian Dasein, being that is presence. The i/ y a refers to the impenetrable and undiscoverable depths of the forest surrounding the clearing in the midst of being.). Following Merleau-Ponty, Toadvine talks of the blind spot of experience, a borderexperience, which refers to what is not revealed in experience, cannot be sensed and cannot be thought, but is no “absolute other” either, merely the other side of the sensible and thinkable. “But if we are seeking the fundamental basis of an ethical response, that basis cannot be worldly; it cannot be within the dialectic of culture and nature, or at the level of perception and thought. The basis for responsiveness is in the call of a more radical Outside. Nature in this radical sense is, if anything, the refusal of the hegemony of perception, language and thought...”(...) He therefore claims that “the attempt to ground such an ethics on a metaphysically homogeneous substratum be displaced by a phenomenology of the impossible — that is, by an attentiveness to the resistance of what cannot be thought or perceived, to the opacity of a wild being that circumscribes our concepts and precepts.””” How does this benefit eco-ethics, one could ask. Toadvine could respond that nature, once we recognise that it always and of necessity surpasses what we are capable of perceiving of it, can only be the object of our respectful wonder. Its incomprehensibility cautions us to a careful, sparing approach. We should also admit that the recognising subject cannot remain on the outside, that to understand is to participate — “as though we were the parts of a single body”, as Merleau-Ponty writes in his work-notes — and the knowledge of original togetherness is a good basis for solidarity. Finally, if we take literally what Abram quotes from these work-notes, “...that the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things (...) That it is being that speaks within us and not we who speak of being," then man’s moral mission as the voice of the Earth and the spokesperson of the living world seems quite obvious. What is certain is that “the phenomenology of the impossible” is an 7 ‘Ted Toadvine: The Primacy of Desire and Its Ecological Consequences. In: C. Brown -T. Toadvine eds.: Ibid. pp.149-50. ” David Abram Ibid. p.343.
