Tom Sparrow on Sensation and the Elements

I’m still waiting for an acquaintance to unlock the secret chambers of my former CPU’s operating system to gain access to my documents (including forthcoming posts on Integral Ecology), but at least I’m getting around to a lot of desired reading while I wait.

Currently I’m enjoying a few amazing essays by Tom Sparrow. Sparrow is a philosopher currently teaching at Slippery Rock University. And I couldn't be more excited about his forthcoming book, Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology. He blogs at Plastic Bodies.

Below is an extraordinary passage from Tom’s essay, “Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis”, where he is riffing off some core ideas in Lingis's work - talking up elementary life and sensuality as a fundamental mode:

“The elements that give life to each one of us by offering themselves as the very stuff of our existence are sensuous material—luminosity, tactility, and sonority bathe our sensitive bodies. As the real source of our nourishment, they lend us sensibility and illuminate our world. Through the elements, the affective quality of sensuality—the unbearable or ethereal modes of bare life—is able to condition our “spontaneity.” No one can spontaneously wrest their psyche from a depressive state or truly induce a rapturous joy within themselves without the influence of some external power. Sensibility is not formal in its pure state, as Kant thinks. It does not come from inside and project itself outward; it does not derive from some transcendent location, over and beyond the sensuous manifold. The perceived sensuous manifold is always immersed within a sensuality which generates a creature whose sensibility emerges with its ripening.” – Tom Sparrow, p.113

I’m enthralled by Tom’s developing aesthetic/metaphysic and intend to follow is project intensely. I have also discussed his work previously here and here.

Cross-fertilize Tom’s words with those of Lingis on “the elements” below:

“Life lives on sensation; the elements are a nourishing medium…The light is not just transparency which the gaze slips through on its way to distant surfaces; our gaze delights in the vivacity of the light itself. It assimilates in its languor the soft depths of the dark. The sonority is not just a succession of sense data which the hearing identifies as signals and information-bits; the ears are contented with the resonance of realm beyond realm as with a content. The touch lets go of things to relish the terrestrial and solar warmth. The earth extends its indefinite expanses before the steps of the nomad who is not scouting for any retreat, moved by his appetite for open roads and uncharted deserts. Erotic sensuality is not a hunger…It surges in a vitality that lacks nothing, is fed and sheltered and contended, a vitality that greets the earth, the skies, the day and the night with the ardor of kisses and caresses.” [Alphonso Lingis]

[ Lingis quote courtesy of Adam Robbert of Knowledge Ecology – a blog any thinking primate needs to follow ]