>
>How to do it? One guide I've found is the work of Gene Gendlin, a
>neo-Heideggerian philosophical-therapist (and U of Chicago professor,
>journal editor, etc.) An early work is _Experiencing and the Creation of
>Meaning_, and there has been much since. I mostly have it in
>pre-publication form, but it should not be too hard to track down the
>cites. He has certainly traveled this route already, and perhaps there are
>others who have. Any leads?
>
Okay, Jay. Here goes. This project you describe, the work of articulating
the "ineffable"
organic knowledges, which we call "feelings" but which, I suspect, are
sites of knowledge-construction, production, reproduction, transformation,
which undulate more than "appear";
Years ago I was immersed in phenomenology and the project of articulating
an "system" of understadning the cycles of "feelings" - , Heideggar,
Husserl, Dilthey,
Paul Ricoeur, William James, Merleau-Ponty, and Rilke's poetry;
I was, at the time
especially intrigued by Heideggar's readings of original Greek texts, and
those interpretations of ancient poetry, translations and tracings of ideas
back to
"pre-scientific" understandings -
anyhooooo, I wrote a paper on it all: my thesis was based on reams of empirical
studies done with infants and with fetus development, and here's what I
speculated:
1 - the fetus' heartbeat (starts at 5 weeks?) is the initial experience
of the human organism with "feelings;"
2 - the heartbeat of the fetus stimulates the development of the inner ear,
which is the first sense-organ to develop in human organisms;
3- this simultaneity, of "feeling" and "hearing" the sounds of the blood,
the heartbeat, prompt an internal rythmic process which, folowing the
development of the inner ear, follows a specific pattern of development
unique to that particular beating pattern,
meaning that neurological development is patterned on these rhythms;
meaning that our interactions with "feeling-sensations" are in a "timing"
rhythm compatible with the initial organic, cellular, neurological,
muscular, skeletal, etc., development.
this experience is reinforced *significantly* by the fetus' experiences of
hearing
the mother's heartbeat, which is, perhaps, the internalized Other,
the internal awareness of being "with" an Other,
and because there is no threat there, it is perhaps comforting? And when it
is removed, at birth, it perhaps the first experience with
self-alientation, as we lose a significant identity-marker, a significant
sense of space;
buuut of course I'm guessing about most of this...
This is expereince of feeling-sensations, the heart beat effectively
setting the "pace" for development, I understand as a "recurvsive
patterning," a cyclical pattern which
seeks/repeats its "origin" for meaning.
Because this experience is never articulated in Western cultures,
there are no words for how we know, how we "feel", how we "sense" things,
"I have a funny feeling..." and so on...
that "gut feeling" is, I think, a process of interpreting the environment
through, say, our skin tempterature, through bio-rhythmic shifts, through
changes in air pressure,
when people or objects move in space, they are changing the waves of space:
it is quite likely our bodies repsond to these changes as well, informing
us of the world in ways which we are incapable of conceptualizing.
One way I found to inquire about these "knowledge-experiences" was to
watch the paralinguistic behaviours of people when they talk abotu what
they "knew" as children.
Faaaaascinating. The hands tell extraordinary stories.
One story in particular... oh, do we have time? (go right ahead diane) why
thank you!
A woman was describing to me the first time she asked her father to help
her with fractions. She was about seven, and she remembers sitting beside
him, and he was drawing pies on a page, dividing the pie and explaining it
all, and she said, "Yes but why a pie???"
so he said, "Oh it can be anything, an apple..." and so he repeated the exercise
and she asked, "Yes but why an apple???" and her father became increasingly
exasperated until she finally said she understood...
and as she told me the story, as an adult remembering that moment,
she began pointing at her chest, telling me, "I _knew_ what he was showing
me, I _understood_ fractions; what I didn't understand was, why food?"
which is hysterically funny, actually.
BUT, interesting: when she said "I _knew_..." she hit her chest the way we
hit our head when we say "I was thinking" or "I was trying to remember"...
when she said, emphatically, "I _understood_..." she hit her chest again,
as though she were recalling the "feeling" of her knowledge, and her
frustration at being unsuccessfully in "languaging" her way to her
question, which was not about fractions at all, but about the
representations being chosen to explain fractions.
Interesting stuff there.
diane
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right." Ani Difranco
*********************************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction,
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada
tel: (604)-874-4807
mail:
3519 Hull Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V5N 4R8