This Morning's Favorite Moment in My Readings

What I have come to understand so clearly now is that the many different brilliant philosophical minds who study and write about consciousness, phenomena, and experience, approach it with what seems like a magnifying glass pointed at and coming from different directions, as if it were a circular sliding scale, or even more so like a kaleidoscope, where each examiner is a colored, morphing bit of appearance, that shows itself and then bows out, making room for what is birthed by the melding of the colors and patterns. And depending on which way you turn the kaleidoscope apparatus, the results they report may be from a position of folding or unfolding within the whole. They argue and fuss about who is correct in what they see from their position of perspective, when they so often don't take the time to realize that they are 'within' what they are examining. They far too often approach the task of examining as if they are on the outside. ... So it's really no wonder that they keep missing the solution to the problem of universals. This morning I was reading from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and I came upon a passage that instantly reminded me of something I wrote about in my Episode 3 of Mapping the Medium. Merleau-Ponty wrote, "The miracle of consciousness is to make phenomena appear through attention that reestablish the object's unity in a new dimension at the very moment they destroy that unity. Attention, then, is neither an association of ideas nor the return to itself of a thought that is already the master of its objects; rather, attention is the active constitution of a new object that develops and thematizes what was until then only offered as an indeterminate horizon. At the same time that it sets attention to work, the object is continuously recaptured by attention, and reestablished as subordinate to it. The object only gives rise to the "knowing event" that will transform it through the still ambiguous sense that it offers to attention as needing-to-be-determined, such that the object is the "motive" [motif] of and not the cause of this event. .. The act of attention.... emerges from its indifferent freedom to give itself a present object. This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself." What the above captivating passage instantly reminded me of, is this utterance by Mikhail Bahktin; "“The better a person understands his determinism (his thingness), the closer he is to understanding and realizing his true freedom.” ... How absolutely beautiful these combinations are to me this morning. :) A wondrous kaleidoscope indeed! I will end this morning's blog entry with a Peirce quote.... "Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. ... Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there." ~ Charles S. Peirce 1906