Category: The Subject of Selves

Most likely you began (and continued) to use the word I to distinguish yourself from other selves, and you to distinguish another self (singular or collective) with whom you are engaged in joint attention from other things, any of which could be the object of your joint attention (i.e. could be referred to in the third person). Continue reading Are you talking to me?

This world is your world: that is, the immediate experience of having this (world) is nothing other than yourself. Yet the world in its appearing, the phaneron (Peirce), has elements common to all possible experience: some Quality, some Otherness, some Mediation (Peirce: Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness). Continue reading The deep structure

A living system is both whole and part. The whole is differentiated (into parts), and the part is individuated to play a specific role in the larger system. To be a self is to have a world, and to have a self is to be a world. Continue reading Playing the whole part

Eduardo Kohn (2013), in his ‘anthropology beyond the human’, describes the lives of the Runa people of Ávila, in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, as inhabiting an ‘ecology of selves’ Continue reading The web of relations

Being organisms ourselves, we often find it ‘simple’ – that is, easy and ‘natural’ – to interact with other organic entities, especially if they are closely related to us. This kind of ‘simplicity’ is transparent and implicit. But when we try to explain how complex systems work by naming their parts and their functions, the symbols we use often turn out very complicated. Continue reading Explanations and complications

I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises toward the world.

— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 87)

Continue reading Lend us your ears!