Page 118 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE BODY AS PAN-CULTURAL UNIVERSAL 111

tiones that comprehend it. Eastern meditational practices bear out the
kinship. "Just sitting" produces insight^'
Now this archetypal mode of self- and world-understanding is at odds
with typical 20th century Western modes of understanding, modes in
which eyes have lost touch with their archetypal power to see into the
dark. They have become merely observant eyes. They are eyes that are
busy gathering information, measuring, quantifying, inspecting, surveying,
looking, watching. They are eyes that are perpetually on the move, and
on the edge rather than at the center. They are eyes of a piece with
bodies that are mere culturally-inscribed surfaces. They are eyes that have
lost sight of their potential to see into the nature of things. To see into
the nature of things requires a sense of their inwardness. It requires a
sense of the life of the thing that one is looking at. In the words of a
long misunderstood but ultimately Nobel-recognized cytogeneticist (whose
work was on a most lowly form of plant life—corn, the plant equivalent
of fruit flies), it requires "a feeling for the organism."^^ A feeling for the
organism. A feeling for stone tools. A feeling for geometry. A feeling for
perception. A feeling for the body. With particular respect to the object,
the relationship Husserl describes between Ego and Object is precisely
akin to "a feeling for the organism." Eyes that lack a feeling for the
organism no longer bring with them a resonant and open sensibility. They
are mere receptor organs. Poised in their sockets, they look at what is
before them and duly record its properties; they watch what they see and
duly record its reactions. All of those optics of power of which Foucault
writes are generated on the basis of just such factual and fact-seeking
eyes. Such eyes have all the living juice squeezed out of them and cannot
fathom being inside. They cannot see into the nature of things; they
cannot see into darkness, neither their own nor that of the object before
them.
The two distinct sets of eyes return us directly to the themes of the
symposium. To work through the body as animate form, as psychophysical
organism, attending to experience and providing corporeal analyses of

*' See Shigenori Nagatomo's "An Analysis of Dogen's 'Casting Off Body and
Mind'," International Philosophical Quarterly 27.3 (September 1987): 227-242. See
also his "An Eastern Concept of the Body: Yuasa's Body-Scheme," in Giving the
Body Its Due, edited by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, 48-68.
^^ See Evelyn Fox Keller's A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of
Barbara McCtintock (New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1983).