Friday, 14 July 2017



No narration or representation can ever capture a single conscious moment in its entirety. The moment is never reduced to definiteness by either internal or external reflection, if you include, as you must, the semi-conscious fringe of that living moment. As against this it might be argued that a work of art which appears to be a sort of representation of a lived moment (as some but not all works are) is effectively a description of that moment, and while admittedly not mapping to a uniquely defined experience, also contains an inexhaustible fringe of latent meanings. A good interpreter can unfold reams of content in a reading of a work so that we do not feel they are making things up but pointing to things we knew but did not know we knew. This kind of exposition creates intellectual pleasure akin to that of a well-turned essay in phenomenology. Be that as it may, it is a case of linking, by way of elucidation in the most general sense, of one kind of experience to another of a quite different kind, both equally unfathomable. Again, it might be urged that the core of the experience is in a few very simple and under-determined elements and that all the infinite richness ascribed to the subjective instantiation of those elements is a sort of fabulation, after the fact, which is put together precisely in order to support this folk-psychological theory of the ineffability of subjective experience. This is probably correct, but the fabulation cannot be viewed as either necessarily false and misleading or as completely separate from the simply determined event of inner and/or outer perception. It is another way of talking about interior and implicit commentary, which is the same as what was previously called the fringe of the experience. The experience, always my experience, is neither the perceptual event nor the commentary, but something that hovers between them. Behind the attempt to make this clear is the difference between what for you is the unsatisfactory identification with the protagonist in a movie and the almost satisfactory identification with the protagonist in a novel - and then applying these two paradigms to self-reflection.

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