Abstract
Unlike the egological operation that marks out the present to appear through recognition (or intuition for Husserl), Zhao proposes a notion of primal sensibility that appeals to pure experience, experience that does not “appear,” that comes from the ancient ages and nameless encounters, rumbling underneath without announcing itself, and brings it to bear on existence. Primal sensibility is not reducible to physical or psychic reactions to stimuli, nor to reactions from over-taxed nerves. It moves in the opposite direction of egological operation. Rather than narrowing down, condensing, and bringing to focus, primal sensibility opens up and appeals to the pure and spiritual, often only to set off on an endless quest for the unattainable and an imaginative recreation of the beyond.
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Notes
- 1.
只可意会, 不可言传, from Zhuangzi: 《庄子·天道》: “意之所随者, 不可以言传也.”
- 2.
Eliot, T. S., “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951). Article retrieved on December 10, 2019 at https://www.usask.ca/english/prufrock/meta.htm.
- 3.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Book II, Chapter I. (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 120.
- 4.
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: Macmillan & Co., 1935), 32.
- 5.
Leonard Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence? The Prioritization of Intuition Over Language in Bergson,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 35, no. 1 (2004): 24–41, 26–27.
- 6.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 184.
- 7.
Leonard Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence? The Prioritization of Intuition Over Language in Bergson,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 35, no. 1 (2004): 24–41, 28.
- 8.
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007/1946), 70.
- 9.
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 63.
- 10.
Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence?”
- 11.
Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence?” 25.
- 12.
Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence?” 38.
- 13.
Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence?” 28.
- 14.
Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence?” 28.
- 15.
Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence?” 28.
- 16.
Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence?” 28.
- 17.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. Paul and W. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 133.
- 18.
Even though for Bergson memory is linked to sense. Sense for him does not denote our encounter with the outside. It is internal sense, sense of the pure memory, but not the pure experience that comes from outside, transcendent to the conscious existence.
- 19.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 184.
- 20.
Bergson’s intuition seeks only the source of experience from within pure memory, which is the whole of perceptions already past, and intuition attempts to bring this whole to participate in perception. Intuition is “to call up the recollection, to give it a body, to render it active and thereby actual” (Bergson, Matter and Memory [1991], 66). Other concepts of intuition in Western philosophy may differ from Bergson’s in one way or another; what is common is that intuition is the ability to reach presentation in a nonrepresentational way.
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Zhao, G. (2020). Primal Sensibility. In: Subjectivity and Infinity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45590-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45590-3_5
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