DAVID W. LONG, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Comparative Philosophy
Author: Body Knowledge: A Path to Wholeness The Philosophy of Michael Polanyi
Department of Philosophy
California State University, Sacramento
226 Moon Circle
Folsom, CA 95630
916 208-0584
pueohonu@comcast.net
namaste@csus.edu
csus.edu/indiv/l/longd
PHILOSOPHICAL SKETCHES: PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE
STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
ABSTRACT: This cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural paper explores and critiques scientific,
philosophical, and psychological concepts of consciousness. It reflects the thinking of
Hungarian scientist-philosopher, Michael Polanyi, the subject of my 2011 book. It also
embodies some of the ideas I presented at the First International Conference for the Study
of Consciousness Within Science in 1990, a gathering of physicists, neuroscientists,
psychologists, and philosophers, all of whom were trying to come to grips with both the
experience and the idea of consciousness in their work.
Concepts without percepts are empty;percepts without
concepts are blind.
---Immanuel Kant
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful
servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has
forgotten the gift.
---Albert Einstein1
The power of science to grow by the originality of individual thought is
thus established within a cosmic perspective of steadily emergent
2
meaning. Science, conceived as understanding nature, seamlessly joins
with the humanities, bent on understanding man and human greatness.
---Michael Polanyi2
Discussions about consciousness are complicated by the fact that
participants do not share a common underlying “ordinary”
consciousness. Everyday experience is founded on what J. D. Teasdale
calls implicational cognition, much of which is not verbally formulated.
An unacknowledged aspect of debate is individuals’ attempts to
negotiate the expression of their unformulated experience. This is
further complicated by the way in which a discourse, based on
particular ontological assumptions, exercises an ideological control
which limits what underlying aspects of experience can be formulated
at all. Charles Tart’s concept of state-specific sciences provides a
framework within which the role of unformulated experience can
be acknowledged and taken into account. Unless this is done, debates
will be vitiated by participants engaging in ideological struggles.
---Psychologist David
Edwards3
. . . . .Creativity is dangerous. We cannot open ourselves to new insights
without endangering the security of our prior assumptions. We cannot
propose new ideas without risking disapproval and rejection. Creative
achievement is the boldest initiative of mind, an adventure that takes its
hero simultaneously to the rim of knowledge and the limits of propriety.
Its pleasure is not the comfort of the safe harbor, but the thrill of the
reaching sail
---Robert Grudin, The Grace
of Great Things:
Creativity and Innovation4
The study of consciousness and the means by which we study it have
dominated my thinking and work for almost 50 years. My examination has
encompassed Western and Eastern, theoretical, philosophical and clinical
3
views of consciousness as well as the methods thinkers and practitioners use
to discover, articulate, modify, and apply such views.
What follows I need to say, and say in the way I do because healthy,
critical dialogue, especially about the issues of consciousness, cannot avoid
confronting the pre-scientific and philosophical premises which support
empirical and theoretical inquiry. The subject of my book, Hungarian
scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, devoted his life and work to unearthing
and displaying the human and philosophical presuppositions of the natural
and behavioral sciences.
This paper might also be seen as a meditation on some of Polanyi’s key
statements in Personal Knowledge and in his Duke Lectures of 1964.
In the former he says,
We start from the fact that no material process governed by the
laws of matter as known today can conceivably account for the
presence of consciousness in material bodies . . . . .To represent
living men as insentient is empirically false, but to regard them as
thoughtful automata is logical nonsense.5
I want to build on some of Polanyi’s revolutionary insights into
embodied consciousness by offering a few remarks about my own
phenomenological investigation of consciousness.
In addition to Polanyi, my work reflects the thinking of William James,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Eugene Gendlin, Eugene Kaelin, Medard Boss, R. G. H.
Siu, H. H. Dalai Lama, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Franklin
Merrell-Wolff, Robert Irwin, Martin Heidegger, Oliver Sacks, David
Kaonohiokala Bray, Idries Shah, and Indian, Buddhist, and Sufi sciences of
man.
Merleau-Ponty’s groundbreaking analysis of consciousness as
perceptual conscious, beginning with Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
had a profound influence on me in the 1960s. It is an important part of the
tacit background of this paper. Polanyi apparently knew little of the
Frenchman’s work when writing Personal Knowledge. William Poteat at
Duke, I am told, introduced Polanyi to the phenomenologist’s key ideas in the
1960s. Merleau-Ponty died in 1961 at the age of 53. Had he lived I am certain
he and Polanyi would have had much fruitful dialogue.
I’ll come right to the point, as I did in the prologue of my book based on
my 1967 dissertation, Body Knowledge: A Path to Wholeness The
Philosophy of Michael Polanyi. I have serious doubts about whether there
4
can be a scientific study of consciousness, given our conceptions of science
and our confusion about what constitutes the proper objects and fields of
investigation. I am equally skeptical about the possibility of meaningful
psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical modeling of experienced and
experiencing consciousness.
I find myself agreeing with one of my most important mentors in
matters scientific, psychological, and medical, Psychiatrist-Philosopher
Medard Boss, whose words resonate so closely with Polanyi’s positions.
Psychology is the science of the ‘psyche’ or mind. Western psychology
has borrowed its methodology and its thought-models from the natural
sciences; but it overlooks the fact that the conceptual universe of these
natural sciences was by no means designed for the investigation of
human life. . . . . Western Psychology tells us absolutely nothing about
the subjectivity of the subject, the personality of the person and the
consciousness of the mind in a manner that would actually enable us to
understand the connexion between these, the environment, and our real
selves. . . . . Never. . . . . has there been a physical medicine, let alone a
psychotherapy nor will such scientific disciplines ever be possible in the
future, without a pre-given specific philosophical first premise
concerning the nature of man, his world and the inherent relationship
between man and his world.6
Boss’s insights arise from his intensive work as a Psychiatrist and
Therapist, as well as his 28-year relationship with Martin Heidegger.
Therapeutic considerations compelled him to put aside virtually all theory in
order to focus on the experiential realities of consciousness.
I applaud Boss’s critique of the neuroscientific, brain-based research,
and philosophical psychology that have dominated the topic for the last 50
years. A survey of technical and popular literature provides ample evidence
of the continued reign of reductionism, scientism, and positivism.7
However, there are growing exceptions and exceptional thinkers,
although they are still a minority. One the best examples is the Dalai Lama’s
Mind and Life Institute that arose out of a number of Mind and Life
Conferences featuring scientists, philosophers, and contemplatives that began
in 1987.8
The philosophy and science of Embodiment as exemplified in the work
of Biologist, Philosopher, Neuroscientist, and Buddhist Francisco Varela,
Philosopher Evan Thompson, and Psychologist Eleanor Rosch is an exciting
cross-fertilization of disciplines and ideas.9
5
As Polanyi argued throughout his writing, scientists, psychologists, and
philosophers need to reveal and confront their underlying premises regarding
man and his being. They need to acknowledge that investigation cannot occur
in the absence of self-conscious, self-critically articulated views about the
human beings.
There is another significant underlying premise that dominates the
sciences and much of philosophy. Roger Bacon and Petrus Peregrinus (13th
Century) called by some the fathers of empiricism, emphasized method over
content. Today, the consensual definition of science encompasses both
method and content. Given the materialist, reductionist orientation of most
scientists, the positivist identification of science with method and the specific
theoretical and empirical content excludes so much of what we humans do
and believe. Polanyi’s remarks I quoted above reinforce this point.
Scientists and Philosophers need to engage in self-interrogation about
what truly constitutes science, for example, a strong emphasis on
methodology per se or an emphasis on methodology directed to particular
bodies of scientific knowledge.
Bodies of knowledge constituting contemporary science are an
extraordinary testament to the creative efforts of so many good and great
scientists.
However, disengaging scientific methodology from specific bodies of
knowledge can lead to remarkably fruitful phenomenological research and
findings. Polanyi’s groundbreaking conceptions of personal knowledge and
the tacit dimension establish and exemplify the epistemological legitimacy of
exploring human domains excluded by positivistic and scientistic thinkers.
For example, there is a distinction that many others and I consider
crucial, i.e., the distinction between Inner Empiricism and Outer Empiricism.
The explorations of German or French phenomenology represent a form of
inner empiricism, especially where observers are able to substantially bracket
ontological superimpositions and instead assert that consciousness is always
consciousness of something, but it is not inherently directional.10
The focused, systematic, experimental inquiry found in classic Indian
and Buddhist Yoga, for example, Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra (somewhere between
the fourth and second centuries, BCE) is a successful example of an enterprise
embodying inner empiricism. In the 195 Aphorisms of this short work,
Patanjali interrogates and dismantles consciousness, its structure, and its
contents, providing the irreducible level of consciousness that Western
philosophers, even Merleau-Ponty, have not been able to grasp.11
6
On the other hand, the methodology of outer empiricism, which
dominates most scientific investigation, declares that consciousness, if it is
recognized at all, is always an inherently directional consciousness of objects
focused on a material world governed by the laws of matter.
However, almost any phenomena in our consciousness and in the world
can be investigated and intersubjectively validated by the methods of science.
Highly trained scientists and phenomenological investigators can observe,
interrogate, and cross-examine phenomena, as does Patanjali. Scientists and
phenomenologists alike can agree or disagree with one another, can discuss
and critique, can find consensus, and perhaps discover ways to introduce
conceptual and theoretical symbolizations that refer to objects of
consciousness whatever their ontological status. Charles Tart’s State-specific
science is intended to reach that goal.12
Philosopher-Psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin offered a fresh and
productive approach to this question 50 years ago in Experiencing and the
Creation of Meaning. Felt meaning as contrasted with logical, intellectual
meaning is at the heart of Gendlin’s pioneering analysis.13
Merleau-Ponty and others who follow in his footsteps have refined and
expanded those initial investigations. And Boss’s work, which depends
heavily on the phenomenologists, represents a radical but fruitful revisioning
of the human sciences and their practical application to philosophy, therapy
and education.
As it stands now, most research and modeling exclude felt experiencing
or conceptualizations based upon first-person experience. Instead, external,
third person observations and theoretical constructs are the currency of much
research. As a result, the conclusions of scientific, psychological, and
philosophical studies of consciousness are remote from the immediacy of
human life and awareness, or what Husserl calls the Lebenswelt, the prereflexive, pre-scientific, pre-philosophical world of purposive human actions
that should guide scientific and philosophical reflections. Educational
Psychologist Cyril Burt once said: “Psychology first lost its soul, then lost its
mind, until it was finally in danger of losing consciousness.”
Polanyi echoed this sentiment in pointing out that we have lost our
lived-in bodies . . . . . by ignoring “. . . the exceptional position of our body in the
universe.”14 In 1945 Merleau-Ponty aptly described the lived-in body as
haunting rather occupying space.
I embrace and celebrate the achievements of science. The work done
charting features of the human being in the world commands our respect. We
possess a wealth of information about brains and behavior, perception,
7
sensation, and learning. The study of man in the last few generations has
produced a revolutionary revisioning of the earlier sciences of man.
Regarding the achievements of so many fine scientists, it isn’t so much
what they produce that troubles me. It is the meaning they impute to what
they are doing, or saying they’re doing, which concerns me. Their narrow
interpretations exclude most of what makes us human beings. Recall the
positivist’s criterion of empirical verifiability—what cannot be observed and
described empirically is meaningless.15
For instance, as Polanyi often points out, scientistic claims abound in the
scientific world. But they’re not scientific claims. Rather they are
philosophical and ideological declarations with no scientific warrant.
Philosophically naïve scientists don’t often distinguish between statements
that are warranted by science and those that are not.
When I review the findings of the sciences and the proposals made by
philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists I seldom have the sense that
the pictures include me, or even the people who create the pictures and make
the proposals. The domain of felt experiencing or felt meaning that
constitutes so much of my personal and social life doesn’t appear to be
mirrored in either descriptions of external observations of behavior, or in
systems of interconnected theoretical constructs intended to explain
behavior.
1500 years ago Augustine, in a perfect mirroring of Polanyi’s “knowing
more than you can tell,” wrote, “If no one asks me what time is, I know
perfectly well what it is; but as soon as someone asks me what it is, I have no
idea.” I feel that way about virtually all conceptualizations relative to direct
experiencing.
Wittgenstein’s often quoted remark strengthens the case for tacit
knowing: “The aim of authentic philosophy is to mean the unspeakable by
clearly displaying the speakable.”16
I can’t deny the immediacy of experiencing any more than Augustine
and Descartes could deny their existence in the act of doubting it. Felt
Experience is manifest. It exemplifies itself. It is the first-person point of view.
Felt Experience, as the primary matrix of the Lebenswelt, is the source of
science, philosophy, religion, and dreams. We never leave it; we always come
back to it after conceptual and linguistic flights of imagination and theory. To
be true to science and philosophy, I think scientists and philosophers have to
acknowledge this immediacy and its significance for our work. Our lives are
played out within its boundaries. Our work presupposes it. It is the medium
8
within which we conjecture and operate, asserting or denying the truth of
theories, models, and pictures.
It is little noticed or acknowledged that the criteria of truth and
evidence are themselves a function of conscious performances within the
same medium. If we reduce our performances to brain states, or sensations,
or behavior, then we undercut the meaning of truth and criteria of rationality.
If neuroscientists claim that they must reduce and explain all claims and
statements in terms of brain states, then those scientists’ explanations are
really nothing more than brain states. How can a brain state be true or false?
Polanyi argued consistently that theories must begin with personal and
social immediacy. They must return to this base if they are to have relevance
and meaning for any of us. Theories are empty exercises in the absence of the
phenomena about which they are theories.
In the third Duke Lecture, Polanyi remarks, “The mathematical theory of
a frog can explain the life of frogs only if frogs are non-theoretically known
beforehand.”17
The Reductionists get mired in the dissected parts and never return to
the whole. Needless to say, phenomena and theory work together to help us
indwell (Dilthey’s Verstehen) and understand what there is in the world, how
we know it, and how we fit into it.
When we forget to consider ourselves while counting objects in the
world, we generate paradoxes we seem incapable of resolving.
The Indian story about forgetting to count yourself that I use in my book
captures this so dramatically.18
Consider a few examples.
No traditional or current theories that I am aware of appear sufficiently
rich in conceptual bridges to first-person experience to account for
themselves or for the theorizer’s actions in creating them.
David Hume’s remark in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion tells
the tale: “What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain that we
call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe.”
Scientific and philosophical investigators of consciousness
interrogating the phenomenon and phenomena of consciousness have always
struck me as peculiar when they fail to be aware of their own consciousness.
By failing to acknowledge their own consciousness they can never achieve
pictures that mirror what it is to be a conscious human being in the world.
Polanyi makes this point frequently.
How are we to free consciousness research from the context of the
consciousness in which we live and out of which our inquiries come? We can’t
9
entirely objectify it, if at all. The definitions and concepts of consciousness
that form the starting point of research are evaluated by standards that lie
outside the scope and methods of research. The pre-scientific background of
experimental inquiry will determine which definitions and concepts are
appropriate. This depends on consensus about the phenomena upon which
we are trying to reach a consensus, which depends on the context of
immediate, felt experiencing. “What we are looking for is what is looking, “
said St. Francis.
As a working Physical Chemist from the 1920s on, Polanyi became
concerned that science, philosophy, and society were in serious trouble.
Science was separated from its philosophical premises and from its social
milieu, as he has argued so forcefully. In the drive toward precise,
comprehensive and fruitful explanations of phenomena, we drift away from
problems and puzzles about human beings, which give rise to our empirical
quest in the first place.
And as we increasingly turn to technical science and philosophy to
resolve our conceptual and life problems, we begin to break contact with the
life and metaphysical domains that make our lives and ideas meaningful.
To truly understand ourselves as human beings we need to turn to
Polanyi and thinkers like him, such as Merleau-Ponty, Gendlin, Boss, the Dalai
Lama, and Robert Irwin.19
But we also need to become familiar with and incorporate insights and
observations from the vast literatures and traditions of Asia and the Middle
East. A synthesis and blending of contributions from the many traditions
around the world and in human history, might enable us to evolve conceptual
and experiential accounts of the seamlessly embodied human being acting in
the world. Jesuit Paleontologist-Philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin gave
voice to my ideal of what and who we are in the world: “We are not human
beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings have a human one.”
10
FOOTNOTES
1. This is from The Expandable Quotable Einstein, collected and
edited by Alice Calaprice. Her collections provide us with a
comprehensive, inclusive picture of Einstein.
2. Preface to Personal Knowledge, p.xi. This preface should be read
and reread to truly understand the origins, originality, and depth
of Polanyi’s work.
3.
4.
“Unconscious Influences on Discourse about consciousness: Ideology,
state-specific science, and unformulated experience,” Indo-Pacific
Journal of Phenomenology, Vol. 5, Edition 1, April 2005, p. 1.
Edwards discusses a number of important ideas, including the work
of Psychologist Charles Tart whom I cite in Footnote 11. Edward’s
work encompasses science and spirituality. He cites Medard Boss’s
work in the article. J. D. Teasdale, now retired, was a highly respected
researcher and clinical psychologist at the Medical Research Council
and Brain Scientists unit at Cambridge. The Indo-Pacific Journal of
Phenomenlogy’s main page contains a seven-point list of key
principles of phenomenology formulated by Lester Embree, one of the
truly great phenomenologists of our era (his CV runs 64 pages).
www.ipjp.org/index.php/aboutphenom.
Robert Grudin, The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and
Innovation, p. 9. Grudin, a retired professor of Comparative literature
has written one of the most extraordinary books on creativity that I
have encountered in over 50 years of reading the literature from many
fields about creativity. In his notes to Chapter 1 he mentions two
famous books that are his favorites, Bernard Lonergan’s Insight, and
Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. Grudin quotes a profound
statement by Polanyi on p. 44, “Having made a discovery, I shall never
see the world again as before. My eyes have become different; I have
made myself into a person seeing and thinking differently. I have
crossed a gap, the heuristic gap which lies between problem and
discovery.”
The great modern classic treatment of creativity is to found in The
Creative Self by the late Cornel Lengyel, an extraordinary writer and
11
poet with whom I had the great good fortune of friendship for many
years. The book, published in 1971, is long out of print. It can be found
many libraries, along with Cornel’s other works.
5. Personal Knowledge, p. 339.
6. A Psychiatrist Discovers India, pp. 9 & 88. Boss visited India and
Indonesia in 1956 and 1958 and published this book in 1958. The first
chapter, “The Necessity of the Journey to India,” encapsulates one of the
most telling and comprehensive critiques of the dominating and
damaging role of materialist science in the West. The book
encompasses a number of themes in the long history of science,
medicine, psychology, and spirituality in India, particularly in the
Ayurvedic system of traditional medicine that goes back to the Vedas of
the mid-second millennium BCE. Boss was able to spend considerable
private time with some of India’s most venerable sages whose private
lives and teachings are little known both inside and outside India. He
provides verbatim accounts of his conversations with these sages. These
sages possessed deep and comprehensive knowledge of Western
science and philosophy. This short book was always a core text in my
Indian Philosophy Courses.
7. My reading includes technical and popular science, literature of all
types, philosophy, religion, spirituality, psychology, engineering,
medicine, neuroscience, politics, education, just to name a few of the
areas I explore. I recommend the Science Daily
Newsletter and a number of other aggregators to get a comprehensive
picture of research in every field showing the good of science as well as
the dominance of reductionism. A fascinating exemplification of this
is in a feature Business Business Week, published in August 30,
1999: 21 Ideas for the 21stCentury.
8. I cite many examples in the prologue of Body Knowledge: A
Path to Wholeness The Philosophy of Michael Polanyi. But
I want to add an article from the February 2012 issue of the
Technology Review. In particular, The Mystery Behind Anesthesia
by Courtney Humphries that features the experience and
reflections of Anesthesiologist Emery Brown at the Massachusetts
General Hospital. He finds he must confront his patient’s consciousness
12
and their reports directly in assessing degrees of awareness while
under anesthesia. Also, in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher
Education: The Chronicle Review, What Buddhist Monks Taught
Me About Teaching Science, science teacher Arri Eisen details his work
with H. H. Dalai Lama who has been fascinated by science and
neuroscience for many years. Eisen is a professor of pedagogy and a
biology and faculty member in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts
and Center for Ethics at Emory University. He participates in Emory
University’s Emory-Tibet Science Initiative—between the Library of
Tibetan Works and the Archives and Emory University.
Physician, researcher, philosophy, poet, novelist Raymond Tallis
published a magnificent book last year: Aping Mankind:
Neuromania, Darwinitis, and Misrepresentation of Humanity
that takes on reductionism, scientism, and materialism. Among other
things, he’s debunking the idea that neuroscience can explain
everything that makes us human. He has published extensively in these
topic areas for many years. He also cites the pioneering work of Mary
Midgeley, who has written extensively on related topics. Her Animals
and Why They Matter is a stunning work. She focuses in her many
writings on what philosophers can learn from nature, particularly from
animals. Tallis says of her “Her incomparably lucid thought about our
conception of animals and about science and scientism has established
her as one of a handful of leading philosophers in the English-speaking
world.”
Three other sources need to be cited. The Center for Consciousness
Studies at the University of Arizona, which hosts the Towards a Science
of Consciousness conferences. The Journal of Consciousness
Studies, which includes a diversity of points of view. The
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. The latter two
contain the work of researchers who are committed to a
neuroscientific reductionism as well as those whose work
encompasses a much vaster arena of consciousness and methods for
exploring embodied consciousness.
9. Embodied Mind, co-authored by Varela, Thompson and Rosch,
Thompson’s Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the
Sciences of the Mind, and Rosch’s numerous writings. Varela became
13
a Tibetan Buddhist in the 1970s, studying with some of the great
Rinpoches (incarnate lamas—the word means precious jewel). Rosch
has written extensively on the implications of Buddhism and
Contemplative features of Western religion for modern Psychology as
well as on the Dalai Lama and compassion.
10. Husserl’s expression of intentionality distinguishes acts of thought
(noesis) and intentional objects of thought (noema). Merleau-Ponty
thought this was not the root level of consciousness. Instead, he
argued that all consciousness is perceptual consciousness. This
implied that all conceptualizations should be reconsidered relative to
the primacy of perception. Polanyi’s analysis is quite compatible with
this.
11.
I strongly recommend Georg Feuerstein’s The Yoga-Sutra of
Patanjali: A New Translation and Commentary (1979). Feuerstein
provides the original aphorisms in Romanized Sanskrit,
followed by a word-by-word analysis of the key terms in the aphorism.
This is followed by an analysis of the meaning of the aphorism and the
history of its terms.
For good Buddhist sources, I heartily recommend Dwight Goddard’s
Buddhist Bible, with selections from Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan,
and modern sources.
12.
Many years ago, Psychologist Charles Tart and others proposed
State Specific Science in order to deal with non-ordinary states of
consciousness and their contents. He published The End of
Materialism in 2009. See the article in the Indo-Pacific Journal of
Phenomenology by David Edwards from which I quoted at the
beginning of this paper. It lays out Tart’s position as well as the
proposals of many other investigators. Tart originally published his
views on State Specific Science in Science in 1972 (not well received).
An amplified version appears in the Journal of the Brazilian
Association for the Advancement of Science, March and June, 1998,
“Investigating Altered States of Consciousness on Their Own Terms: A
Proposal for the Creation of State-Specific Sciences.”
14
13.
Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, p. 286-88. Gendlin cites
many passages from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 210.
14.
Duke Lecture #3, Commitment to Science, p. 20.
15.
Einstein’s quotation in the book I cited in Footnote #1 is right on
target. He says “I am not a positivist. Positivism states that what
cannot be observed does not exist. This conception is scientifically
indefensible, for it is impossible to make valid affirmations of what
people ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ observe. One would have to say ‘only what we
observe exists,’ which is obviously false.”
16.
This is Jacob Needleman’s paraphrase of 411.5 in the Tractatus.
17.
Op. cit, p. 3.
18 . It seems there were ten merchants on their way in order to
conduct transactions in another city. They had come to the banks
of a broad river. The rains had caused it to rise so much that it
had swept away the bridge. Nevertheless, their business was
urgent. And so the merchants decided to swim across the river.
When they reached the other bank, one of them began to count
the group. He wanted to make sure that no had drowned during
the crossing. To his horror, however, he always ended up with
nine instead of ten, no matter how often he repeated the count.
The others too began to count. But no one got a higher figure than
nine. A hermit, coming along, delivered them from distress and
doubt. He laughed merrily, counted the merchants and found that
all ten were there. Only then did they notice that each of them,
when making his count, had forgotten to include himself.
19.
Artist, philosopher, architect Robert Irwin has been one of the most
influential figures for me in recent decades. Phenomenologistwriter Lawrence Weschler brings Irwin to us in Seeing Is Forgetting
the Name of the Thing One Sees and Robert Irwin Getty Garden
(Garden photography by Becky Cohen). There is no experience quite
like walking through Irwin’s garden at the Getty Museum in Los
Angeles through the seasons. It discloses Irwin’s life and work and
15
provides a unique set of felt experiences. Irwin and many of his artistic,
scientific, and philosophical colleagues are deeply embedded in
phenomenology.
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