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| Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash |
« Ki as a phenomenon of feeling »
In this presentation, I would like to introduce my dissertation’s project, in which the main aim is to explore numerous verbal expressions connected to the east Asian concept of ki (chin. qi / 気) as an approach to a phenomenology of feelings and emotions. This Sino-Japanese term used for air, sense, feeling, atmosphere, mood, smell, intention, interest etc. has a broad and flexible range of meanings, including its transformative character, taking a position between materiality and immateriality or its being both at the same time. In my current research, the main thesis is concentrated on the following three points:
- To assert feelings as both bodily and mental phenomena.
- To see feelings as intersubjective phenomena which are grounded in their interpersonal contexts and their situatedness in a place (both in a way which can be seen analogous to an atmosphere or mood, and also in the sense of an interactive energetics of affection, intentionality and ki).
- To be able to assert that feelings that emerge in our everyday life are not closed, personal and private phenomena with an obvious frame to which they belong, a specific ownership, or a clear starting point.
It seems to be more appropriate to say that they occur in a spontaneous way (to be expressed in the grammatical form of the middle voice) and in a concrete situation where the people involved are always already formed by their bodily as well as mental being and their historicity, culture, customs, but also by their personal attitudes, tendencies and their daily conditions etc. By saying that feelings emerge “in a spontaneous way” I would like to show a value-free dimension of feelings and emotions in their way of arising, as it is introduced in the third book of Spinoza’s Ethics. Through this non-judgmental view, the categorizing border between pure activity and pure passivity in affection or emotional movement becomes vague and unclear. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean a blind acceptance of pathetic chaos or a blind belief in the determination of “nature” for instance. On the contrary, my interest lies in finding a starting point to pose the question of how we should and can cope with this indefinability of a state between pure activity and pure passivity in our emotional way of being. Precisely through this non-judgmental perspective, there can be found the freedom and possibility to get into contact with and work on one’s own emotional way of being, which represents the last part of my dissertation on the cultivation of feelings.
The concept of ki, which is introduced also in comparison with the classic Greek word “pneuma” and the Sanskrit term “prajna” by Yamaguchi Ichirō, covers the three points mentioned above. In my presentation, I will explore the previous three points with argumentations and examples from my current research on ki, which is related to the concepts of “mood” (風情) and “feeling reason” (感ずる理性), as introduced by Ōmori Shōzō and Nishida Kitarō.
FrancescaGRECO (Université de Hildesheim, Allemagne)
The aim of my presentation is to explore the relation between Nishida´s use of the expression soku (即) in his late works and the phenomenological structure of the ‘boundary’ concept. By approaching the problem with a transformative phenomenology I will call into question the role of the opposition, the relatedness and the contradiction inherent to a certain logic of soku in Nishida´s thinking. Afterwards I will try to apply this logic to the phenomenon of the boundary (ὁρισμός, horismós; ὁρίζω, horizo).
I will begin by analyzing the appropriation of soku by Nishida in order to point out how the development of this concept affords him to mature his thinking and open new paths of philosophying. The central idea is that soku has been used by Nishida as a method that can spell out the contradictions and interceptions of the world. Putting soku into practice in his ‘logic of place’ Nishida is drifting away from Hegel, even if he keeps using his formulations and terminologies. Moreover, in my opinion, Nishida approaches more and more Heidegger´s and Derrida´s thinking, on whom I will refer to interpreting soku as structure. The guiding thread is that soku represents not only a non-dual logic, but a more complex structure of thinking, almost a method of analysis of phenomena.
Furthermore my intent is to develop a short phenomenology of the boundary and show the difficulties that it introduces. Boundaries have the ambivalent function to create identities by enclosing an existence’s field of something and at the same time the task of differentiating it from something else. But the simultaneity of this operation slips us often away, not only because the boundary forces us to observe two different actions at the same time. The main difficulty in this simultaneity is that in its acting the boundary is opening a new field of thinking: the boundary in itself is not neutral, it is in turn a thing. The boundary occupies a particular space: it is a leeway that essentially modifies the relation between opposites; between the inside and the outside, identity and difference. The boundary functions as horizon in which we are trying to grasp a thing as that very thing.
My purpose is to show how the function of the boundaries as leeway is rather polyvalent than only ambivalent and that because of what I will call soku-structure. Employing the soku-structure to interpret the phenomenon of boundary I will show how this is indeed the threshold that brings to overcome the dualism and open a new thinking of relationality based on Nishida use of soku.
La séance aura lieu : de 14h30 à 17h30 à l’Inalco, 65 rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris, salle 3.15.
