c. Mary Kathryn Gough
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Phenomenological Movement Journal
Katie Huffman / PHIL 340 / Halteman
Journal # 1.5 (date?) ; Response to the Phonomenological Movement
Several Quotations I reacted to very strongly:
“When epistemological inquiry sought to answer the question of how the subject, filled with his own representations, knows the external world and can be certain of its reality, the phenomenological critique showed how pointless such a question is” (p.131).
“To that extent, the method of phenomenology, in contrast to all scientific methods, is a method which has no foundation, the way of a “transcendental experience,” not an empirical induction. For it must first create its ground for itself” (p.160).
“Now all these relativities, even out captivity in our own life-world, which has become historical, lose their disconcerting meaning when the eidos “life-world” as such and the range of it’s variation is known” (p161-162).
“The idea of a gathering of all the past into the “absolute” present of an “absolute knowledge” proves itself to be absurd. Just as the future, which fades away into the uncertain distance, is incorporated into the immediate flow of the ego as an infinite horizon, so does the past, which also fades into the distance” (p.162).
The idea of philosophy and the use of language being the self-healing of self-inflicted wounds (p.177) was also particularly striking to me. That “the field of language is not only the place of reduction for all philosophical ignorance, but rather itself an actual whole of interpretation that, from the days of Plato and Aristotle till today, requires not only to be accepted, but to be thought through to the end again and again…” rung so true.
I really liked the articulation that “we are ever and again only “on the way to language”” (p.177).
This reading, though very difficult, was joyously so. The challenge was fascinating and I loved every minute I spent with it! 🙂 Many things hearkened back to our class lectures and the few texts we had thus far consumed 😉 but I only caught onto a few, I know. In reading the piece over again I find more and more that I can say I have a fuller understanding of where I had only an inkling of meaning and direction before…
c. Mary Kathryn Gough (huffman, maiden)
against another rain
these rains are soft and
searching, long and
lurching with the need that
scrabbles
deepwithin my chest
for a toe-hold: one small crack
in which to place a finger-
nail but today my heart is obsidian
,smooth as glass,
and that precious, ancient,
spongey wisdom of Redwood is far
from my stony mind and anguished
spirit as i grit my teeth against
all the living, moving glory that could be
Love.
c. Mary Kathryn Gough
10/27/05 4.54 pm, edit: 17 Feb 8.57 pm
Further Always
)i’ve a notion tonight that there’s a further way to live than i
do, and that it is far from impossible to live.
i’ve always believed so, but this feeling tonight is like rubber on the road, like violets peeking out of soil, like music from strings of gut — organic and all contact — this can be, is, if i would only let it.
i’ve found something, the idea of fire is no longer abstract, but living flame that moves and breathes and grows — no mere idle dreaming of what ought to be but is not– it is, i am, we can be, so, easily, so. fragile, with a touch(!) pushed over the edge into all feeling knowing touching thinking connectivity and life, neurons like combustion engines beginning things with powerful push to go forth and create, to go forth and multiply out of one’s very self [with what material is to be found nearby] to replicate, ennumerate, and grow, (learnbeauty)evolve [with the tools at hand, with] the sharing of heart and mind and soul that is to be found in this great host of communal life — withallwhyistheresomuch death?
i, however, i. i am committed to further in and further up, to a further way to live, to flowers and fast-fury-movement and flame and oxygen and song and notions and soil and smells and rain -hope in its bows- and vitasunshine running through the veins of the earth where its light does not apparently reach i am committed, latched in, rooted like a great tree, in all i know of life and love and joy
and death has been is always forever defeated.
this i know, further than i did before, always further, always further towards finality that never ends(
c. Mary Kathryn Gough
3/2/07 12.40 am santa cruz mtns.
Ancestors
c. Mary Kathryn Gough, 2/12/04
This was a fridge magnet poem – the first I ever worked hard to keep. I likes it! 😉
Anyway. Tried to keep all the spacings what they were on the fridge – it’s part of the medium and also part of the impact. Fridge magnet poems have a unique kind of impact I think, simply because of the un-editable and varied spacings it develops as it is written.
~Kate
