The Virtual Body

Recently a fair amount of attention has been paid to the concept of expression in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. As a number of authors have pointed out, this concept plays an important role not only in Merleau-Ponty's theory of language, but also in his discussions of art, history, and even truth.1 One of the best treatments can be found in Lawrence Hass's book Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy. Hass deals almost exclusively with expression as a mode of language, however, leaving us with an incomplete picture. Other commentators have dealt with the topic in a similar way. As we shall see, an understanding of the crucial role of emotion in expression is essential if we are to comprehend how expression (in the sense that Merleau-Ponty uses this word) is possible. Hass for the most part only looks at Merleau-Ponty's discussion of expression in the unfinished text The Prose of the World. I hope to show that a full understanding of this work is only possible on the basis of an acquaintance with Merleau-Ponty's explication of expression in Phenomenology of Perception.2Crucial to Merleau-Ponty's theory of language (and this is something that remains consistent between Phenomenology of Perception and his later works such as The Prose of the World) is his distinction between sedimented language (la langage) and expressive speech (la parole).We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweep me on from the signs toward meaning-sedimented language and speech.3Sedimented language resembles somewhat the synchronic face of language in Saussure's synchronic/diachronic distinction. It is language as already constituted, with meanings (of words, phrases, and sentences) bearing more or less stable and direct reference to objects and states of affairs. Sedimented language is an institution, a vast reservoir of ready-made meanings upon which we draw to make our thoughts known to others.4 Language thus understood may accurately be said to be representational in function.5However, Merleau-Ponty argues that this begs the question of how the words and configurations of words received their meaning in the first place. How is it that a word comes to represent an idea?6 Simple cases such as tree or chair are amenable to the interpretation that we simply agree to designate the class of objects by this sound. However, many words do not designate simple objects that we can point to in the world. What of abstract concepts such as democracy or patriarchy? And what of verbs such as teach or adjectives such as blue?7 Cases such as these show us that words do not and cannot receive their meaning from objects in the world, because the word itself defines the class of objects which it stands for. Democracy names an idea that did not exist before someone decided to group a set of related social practices together under this heading. This is true not only in the case of complex abstractions such as this one, but also the simple cases which first misled us that meaning is a simple case of reference. How is a tree different from a bush? How do we distinguish between a chair and a couch or a love seat? Even in the simplest cases, word meaning owes its existence to a decisive act which so to speak cleaves off a portion of the world and gives it an identity distinct from the rest. In this way we can understand Saussure's otherwise counter-intuitive notion that the words of a language possess their meaning not by virtue of reference to their objects, but by differentiation from the other words of the same language.8The act of naming something which has not been named before, of creating an idea, is what Merleau-Ponty calls speech (la parole).Speech is the operation through which a certain arrangement of already available signs and significations alters and then transfigures each of them, so that in the end a new signification is secreted. …

(ProQuest: ... denotes text stops here in original.) Many scholars in the West have rightly turned away from the modernist world view of Descartes, with its isolated rational individual in full possession of both itself and one rational world. Many have also rightly turned away from the related modernist political view of bourgeois liberalism, with its isolated individual as the rational bearer of natural and even God-given rights. Yet, with the rather extreme pendulum swing by many toward postmodernism, with its counter claim that our rational world and the rational subject are more or less freely constituted by language, one is left with the impression that something of value has been lost: a patterned world with which the human person or subject is in contact.1 With respect to both the rational world and the human subject, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, as it does with respect to so many issues, comes between more extreme positions, in this case between modernism and postmodernism. He moves beyond both modernism's pre-established rationality and the bourgeoisie's isolated rational subject, but does so by re-interpreting and redefining each, not by attempting to eliminate them. Moreover, his grounding of both rationality and the sense of self in the body's lived-through encounter with a really existing world escapes the foundationalism of modernism, since this encounter continues to unfold, and it escapes the arbitrariness of postmodernism, since this encounter is stable enough to make at least some non-arbitrary generalizations about both the world and the human experience of it. Given this last point, that human experiences, and thus more generally human nature, are stable enough to make at least some provisional generalizations about them, it seems plausible to maintain an at least modified (non-essentialist) theory of alienation, and that this theory may still be used to guide a politics - even in our so-called postmodern age. This, then, will be the focus of the present essay: it will present MerleauPonty's theory of rationality and of the human subject as coming between modernism and postmodernism; it will present a nonessentialist theory of alienation; and it will attempt to make the case that this nonessentialist theory of alienation can still be used to guide politics. Modernism Before taking up Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, let us first turn to a brief characterization of how both the modernist and postmodernist treat the human subject, and, given their respective theories of the subject or of human nature, how each then addresses politics. The concept of rationality will be addressed further below. As is well know, Descartes defines the modern subject as the indubitable and complete reflective awareness of oneself by oneself, as a complete awareness of oneself as a conscious, thinking entity, i.e., as a thinking substance, with a precise rational identity. This rational self, which is separate from the world, others, and even embodied emotions, can nonetheless rationally manipulate and control the world, others, and itself. With this sort of view of the subject more or less incorporated into Natural Law Theory, employed variously by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and even by Marx, as well as by many to follow, we find a precise human essence, given in nature or even by God, from which we may be alienated, that more or less absolutely dictates what its proper social and political environments should be. Postmodernism A variety of views regarding the postmodern subject is admirably revealed and summarized by Pauline Marie Rosenau in Post-Modernism and the Social Science.2 She states that postmodernists frequently propose a de-emphasizing of the personal subject and, generally, that they call for less emphasis on the subject [considered] ... as the 'preconstituted centre of the experience of culture and history'3 (PMSS 42). Of Nietzsche, as one of the most significant precursors of the postmodern rejection of the modern subject, Rosenau states the following: Nietzsche questioned the . …

Bernard Waldenfels superb essay Verite a Faire: Merleau-Ponty's Question Concerning permits us to conceive of MerleauPonty's theory of truth in a succinct and, I believe, accurate fashion.' Merleau- Ponty's works are notoriously complex, multifaceted, and even oblique, with various important insights often scattered over many pages and often even over several feature length works. Waldenfels therefore serves the scholarly community well by pulling together MerleauPonty's frequently profound yet dispersed insights, in this case on truth. In this essay I hope to take full advantage of Waldenfels' analysis, yet I will also attempt to extend it by adding aspects of Merleau-Ponty's insights into the nature of truth not mentioned by Waldenfels, particularly with respect to Merleau-Ponty's account of reason, and I will attempt to extend it by showing how Merleau-Ponty's theory of truth can be used to understand an ethical theory that lies dormant and only implied in Merleau-Ponty's writings. From the perspective of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy generally, the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth, as they are traditionally conceived, are both intellectual, abstract constructions that do not put us in contact with lived perceptual meaning. Correspondence places a representation in an external relationship to a thing. This representation and what it relates is true when it matches the things and their relationships to one another, false when it does not. Truth here involves an external relationship of thing (representation) to thing (thing in-itself).2 Truth as coherence, on the other hand, obtains when one concept is logically consistent with other concepts, false when it is not. Truth here involves an internal relationship of meaning or of ideas.3 Notice here that the Western philosophical tradition has separated content or matter (discrete things or units in external relationships) and form or mind (ideas expressing internal relationships of meaning). In a life-long professional effort, Merleau-Ponty attempts to over come this dichotomy (and many others) and here integrates form and content in the lived through perceptual event. As I perceive a physical structure drawn on a piece of paper before me (say the famous gestalt duck/rabbit), I actively organize the object as a duck or a rabbit. These different organizations occur at the level of perception and not at the level of abstract judgment, as they do in the traditional theories. Lived perception is thus already meaningful, and it is meaningful in a way that goes the external relationships of the lines to one another. There is certainly something there for the embodied observer to relate, but these lines, which stand only in an external relationships to one another, are now related meaningfully, and in different ways by the perceiver, either as a duck or as a rabbit. Merleau-Ponty refers to this experience as a sensible idea, where the parts of the perceptual field are related meaningfully, going beyond the merely physically given, yet they are related in a concrete way, in a way that cannot simply be derived from abstract ideas, that cannot simply be a manifestation of the internal relations of formal abstractions.4 For Merleau-Ponty, then, lived through perceptual consciousness is embodied and actively engaged in the world. Embodied consciousness receives information from the world yet simultaneously organizes it. Where the active, interested body and the patterned world meet and intersect, there meaning is formed. This meaning is therefore born as a perceptual gestalt, as a perceptual pattern or variable norm, for the optimal perception delivers a balance of richness and clarity.5 There is thus a mute meaning at the perceptual level, a perceptual pattern that is meaningful but not yet spoken.6 Truth, then, will involve bringing this lived through perceptual sense to full expression in language. We will possess truth when a statement makes sense of the perceptual sense, when, as Waldenfels says, it hits the point or hits the mark, by bringing this sense to a full expression or meaning. …

It now clear that took seriously the criticism that Being and Time did not adequately address the human body.1 He addresses this criticism in the Zollikon Seminars2 and provides a brief outline of an existential theory of the body, one that bears a striking similarity to Merleau-Ponty's, as both Richard Askay and Kevin Aho have recently claimed.3 Another thing that clear that MerleauPonty was among the most Heideggerian of the French philosophers of his generation, since he adopts Heidegger's etoasis characterization of human existence, i.e., the subject's active transcendence toward the world, and speaks of perception as occurring through the anonymous of the body and not as a personal choice.4 It also true, as some have claimed, that The Visible and Invisible5 Merleau-Ponty 's most Heideggerian text,6 since, in his own words, he attempts to move even further from the of Phenomenology of Perception - by developing an ontology of the Flesh, by developing a theory of perception that nature perceiving itself through one of its own, through the human body. In a Heideggerian spirit, Merleau-Ponty claims that the individual's experience rests upon the body that opens to a world that includes it and other human bodies. The individual's Flesh blends with the greater Flesh of the world. Yet, even though recent commentators have claimed that a similarity between Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body, they have also claimed that Heidegger's Being-in-the-world supersedes the body and remains more primary. Heidegger's position remains more worldly and less attached to the subjectivism that necessarily remains a part of an individual's orientation toward the world, and, apparently, the subjectivism that remains a part of Merleau-Ponty 's theory of the body (Askay 32). Kevin Aho presents Heidegger's analysis of the body in the Zollikon Seminars as similar to Merleau-Ponty's in that each seeks to overcome the body understood merely as an object or merely as a vehicle for a Cartesian subject. For both the body must be understood as Uvedthrough (Aho 15). However, Aho also claims that the Zollikon Seminars remain at the level of the ontic-existetiell, describing the concrete activities and perceptions of a 'factical' individual. This of course means that the comparable analysis provided by MerleauPonty, especially in Phenomenology of Perception, also remains at the level of the ontic, at the level of the individual's body (Aho 16; see Askay 32-33). Aho also points out that Being and Time, on the other hand, more primarily concerned with the ontological structures that determine the of beings ___ These constitute the Da, the disclosure site in which any entity whatsoever can show up as such and such. That why claims that it a mistake to interpret as . . . in a determinate place, 'here and not there' (Aho 16).7 One thing, then, that distinguished from Merleau-Ponty that the latter adheres to the here-there structure of a particular embodied opening upon the world, while Heidegger, at least in Being and Time, focuses on the there in a way that supposedly transcends the here of the situated, embodied subject. As Richard Askay expresses it, referring to and quoting Heidegger, bodily possible because our beingin-the-world always already consists 'of a relatedness in which we perceive-apprehend that which addresses us out of the openness of our world' (Askay 32: see ZS-G 293, ZS-E 232).8 Bodily-being, he continues, is 'founded upon' Dasein's responsiveness to the clearing (Askay 32: see ZS-G 232, ZS-E 186). Moreover, he states that Dasein 's existence the precondition for the possibiUty of being (Askay 32; see ZS-G 113, ZS-E 86-87). Askay thus concludes that Heidegger . . . would no doubt have accepted MerleauPonty's premise that the Uved body and existence 'presuppose each other,' and yet deny his conclusion that neither 'can be regarded as the original of the human being' (Askay 33). …

Hegel's mediated understanding of history is vital for the development of Merleau-Ponty's theory of history. From Hegel, Merleau-Ponty takes the views that history has a rational structure, and that history's structure is supported by human coexistence. In Part 1, I will show the Hegelianism behind Merleau-Ponty's view of history. Although his philosophy of history is where Merleau-Ponty owes Hegel his greatest debt, it is also where Merleau-Ponty goes furthest in mocking him. He attacks Hegel in the classic style, accusing him of idealism, of rationalism, of hubris, of messianism. In Part 2, I will explicate three criticisms Merleau-Ponty levels against Hegel's view of history, concerning (a) the reification of reason and its status as an absolute operating above actual history, (b) Hegel's method or perspective on actual history, and (c) the teleology or necessity of the rational course of history. These criticisms are not just arguments against Hegel, but ways in which Merleau-Ponty articulates his own view of history. Hegelianism in Merleau-Ponty's Conception of History. Merleau-Ponty and Hegel both argue against abstract views of history, which they both define as views that give history a power or force outside of the individuals and that make determinations about individuals on a universal basis without any historical consciousness. In other words, views that make history a supernatural force or entity (and thus make human beings into the playthings of this force), and views that claim that history is the mere sum of actions by historical individuals, are inadequate to the task of comprehending actual history. What must be understood is how history can be the bearer of its own meaning while at the same time be the field of action by world-historical individuals. For instance, both the structure of history supporting dictatorships in general, and the specific appearance on the scene of history of a Napoleon or a Stalin, must be comprehended. Merleau-Ponty follows Hegel in adopting a teleological view of history as a means of making this comprehension possible. That history has a coherent meaning implies, in the first place, that history has a rationally developing structure, a claim which Hegel put in succinct terms: What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand, and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of spirit as well as the universe of nature. (PhR, 10)1 If the actual were not rational, then the world would have meaning, and nothing in the world would call for any action; we would live in chaos. This kind of indetermination is inconceivable: to believe that there is rationality in the world is to be skeptical. Since the world is rational, at least in this sense, Hegel claims the task of philosophy, and in this case the task of the Philosophy of Right, is to give an account of the immanent rationality of the state and history. Thus it is a description of the appearance of rationality in the form it takes in the state. The infinite wealth of the forms of history and the state-the infinite forms of the rationality of the world-are not the proper object of philosophy, which is concerned with rationality itself. Merleau-Ponty agrees that if history and the world in general had structure that subtended our freedom, then history would have meaning, direction, and no event would seem to take shape in it, and anything might emerge from anything else (PhP, 449). Freedom would have meaning either, since freedom means something only against its background, only where it can be perceived to exist: Which means that we confer upon history its significance, but not without its putting that significance forward itself. The Sinngebung is not merely centrifugal, which is why the subject of history is not the individuals .... We are not asserting that history from end to end has only one meaning, any more than has an individual life. …

Preoccupations with the experiences of brain tumor patients and their family members are recent. The disease' intense physical and psychosocial impact on patients and the repercussions for their family environment, the adversities of treatment and the unfavorable prognosis result in a very serious picture, even in comparison with other types of cancer. In this context, this study aims to understand the experiences of brain tumor patients and their family members. The research collaborators, who were patients with different brain tumor diagnoses and their companions, attended waiting room group sessions at the Oncological Neurosurgery Outpatient Clinic of the University of So Paulo at Ribeiro Preto Medical School Hospital das Clnicas. For the discourse material, which formed the base for the comprehension task, seven group sessions were audio-taped and fully transcribed. A qualitative method was adopted, using a phenomenology-based psychology, while reflections on the experience were based on the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In understanding the analyzed reports, two issues stood out. Firstly, for the patients, and definitely for the family members, the sickening experience is marked by the sense that the current life is very different from the past. There is as if it were a shock between the I-current body and the I-past body. Secondly, the patient's experience is marked by a noticeable personal restriction. This restriction appears in movement, language and sexuality disturbances; in the fears and anguish the patient is attacked by; in the family relations that are established, marked by a limiting overprotection and by the dependence in relation to other persons' care; and in the experiences with the extra-family social environment, which arouse shame and the urge to get isolated. As to family members, their experience is mainly guided by the effort to offer a care that favors the ill person's well-being. However, caregivers bear an intense burden of preoccupations and fears that lead to a sometimes overprotective attitude. Furthermore, the brain tumor patient's family members also experience personal losses and great physical and emotional wear. Some elements in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy made it possible to elaborate and enrich the comprehensions highlighted above. We are a body that is continuously directed at the world and this body we are is not the body discussed in the field of biomedical knowledge, but a phenomenal body, the lived body. Consequently, in the gravest cases of brain tumor, the person's movement towards the world can be seriously impaired. Another notion that stands out is the fact that attitudes are constructed towards the sickening, that is, movements of the being in the world that are ruled by an existential structure that essentially contains the limiting organic event. Finally, the idea was explored that any attitude towards the disease mobilizes all dimensions of the being, more specifically temporality and being with the other in the experience of this study's collaborators.

Merleau-Ponty's philosophy provides an important reworking and extension of Edmund Husserl's ideas of intersubjectivity. This reliance on Husserl, however, opens Merleau-Ponty's account of relations with others to criticisms made by Emmanuel Levinas, who claims that phenomenology fails to account for the alterity or absolute otherness that, for him, lies at the heart of intersubjectivity. In this chapter I shall defend Merleau-Ponty against this criticism. The analysis proceeds as follows: first, I provide an overview of Husserl's account of intersubjective experience, the starting point for Merleau-Ponty's early approaches to the question; second, I touch upon the most significant criticisms of this account, notably those of Levinas and his emphasis on the absolute alterity of the Other; and, finally, I examine the evolution of Merleau-Ponty's own theory of intersubjectivity and the extent to which it can avoid these criticisms, as represented by the account he provides in his major uncompleted work, The Visible and the Invisible . Husserl and the problem of intersubjectivity As Husserl realized, the public nature of the lifeworld and the presence of other subjects within it poses a surprisingly serious problem – some would say, the problem – for any phenomenology. Since all consciousness for Husserl is intentional, and all intentional consciousness is “constituting” – i.e. the perceptual world of objects and forms is rendered present due to the subject's synthetic activities alone – there is simply nothing immediately apparent to indicate that experience should possess the public nature that it in fact does. At a transcendental level, the subject's constitutional activities are by definition internal to consciousness and, hence, private.

The Pratyabhijñā (“Recognition”) system, designed by the Śaiva nondualist Utpaladeva (c.925–975 ce) and expounded by Abhinavagupta (c.975–1025 ce) stands out as one of the greatest accomplishments of Indian philosophy. Engaging in a dialogue with all the rival currents of thought of his time, and claiming that the realization of our identity with God (understood as a single, all-encompassing, and all-powerful consciousness) can be achieved through the mere recourse to experience and reason, Utpaladeva transforms the Śaiva scriptural dogmas into philosophical concepts. His “new path” is aimed at demonstrating that the essence of any individual’s consciousness is none other than the absolute freedom characterizing God’s creativity. While examining Utpaladeva’s use of the concept of freedom in several major Indian controversies (such as the debates over the existence of the self or the ontological status of perceived objects), this article explores his phenomenological attempts to uncover the freedom of consciousness in our most ordinary experiences.

Some central debates in current political theory have been dominated by the opposition of approaches insisting on either “constituent power” or “destituent power.” Recently, some suggested an alternative to this opposition: the role of “instituent powers.” Yet this notion is nothing new and in fact harks back to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of institution. The article will explore what this theory might offer for reconceptualizing politics today. By focusing on the lecture titled “Institution and Passivity” from 1954–55, as well as on Merleau-Ponty's reading of Machiavelli, the author indicates how a theory able to hold together both ends of the chain — the instituted order and the instituent, inaugural event establishing it in the first place — locates Merleau-Ponty's political philosophy in a tradition set up by Claude Lefort, that of “post-foundational” political theory.

This article presents the work by the Swedish play scholar Gunilla Lindqvist, particularly what she calls creative pedagogy of play and playworlds. Creative pedagogy of play is an educational approach, which advocates the joint participation of children and adults in a collectively created and shared world of fiction—a playworld. Gunilla Lindqvist's pedagogy was designed to investigate how aesthetic activities can influence children's play as well as the nature of the connections between play and the aesthetic forms of drama and literature. Lindqvist based her theory on Vygotsky's theories of art, play, semiotics, imagination, and creativity. Her main idea is that children develop consciousness in dialogical interactions with adults and peers when encouraged and invited to play in a fictitious world where reality and imagination are dialectically related. This article is a homage to her work—it attempts to present her writings through an appreciative and expository fashion.

The book defends a systematic interpretation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theory of imagination. To this end, it offers an account of what kind of mental capacity Kant takes imagination to be in general, as well as an account of the way in which we use this capacity in theoretical, aesthetic, and practical contexts. In contrast with more traditional theories of imagination, as a kind of fantasy that we exercise only in relation to objects that are not real or not present, it proposes that Kant theorizes imagination as something that we exercise just as much in relation to objects that are real and present. It thus attributes to Kant a view of imagining as something that pervades our lives. In order to bring out this pervasiveness, it explores Kant’s account of how we exercise our imagination in perception, ordinary experience, the appreciation of beauty and sublimity, the production of art, the pursuit of happiness, and the pursuit of morality. However, it also makes the case that Kant’s analysis of this wide range of phenomena is underwritten by a unified theory of what imagination is as a remarkably flexible cognitive capacity that we can exercise in constrained and creative, playful and serious ways.

George Orwell, though not a philosopher in the academic sense, was uniquely positioned to respond to the era’s dominant intellectual lines of thought on politics and the philosophy of the human condition. Operating on the premise that political and philosophical thought are often inseparable – especially in the turbulent context of twentieth-century Europe – this article begins by examining Orwell’s obvious disenchantment with left-wing intellectualism and its perceived detachment from ordinary experience and political reality. In foregrounding several critiques of the left-wing intelligentsia, both at home and in continental Europe, we are provided with the necessary context for understanding Orwell’s specific engagement with the work, politics, and philosophies of Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. It argues that Orwell’s engagement with both thinkers reveals a consistent resistance to theoretical detachment, and a preference for realism. In so doing, we see that Orwell’s political commentary cannot be entirely separated from his broader philosophical instincts, which favoured clarity, directness, and, ultimately, a moral seriousness that preferred action over abstraction.

Tragedy revolves around primary contract of man and nature, contract fulfilled by man's death, death being, as we say, debt he owes to nature. --Northrop Frye, Fools of Time (1) The situation is an appeal: it surrounds us, offering us solutions which it's up to us to choose. --Jean-Paul Sartre, For a Theater of Situations (2) Pig Iron Theatre Company's Pay Up, (3) originally produced for Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in 2005 and most recently revived in September 2013, is not so much a piece of interactive theater as an interactive situation, in which theater, radically abbreviated, is offered. (4) I wrote text for Pay Up in collaboration with company, and my hope in this essay is to examine some of ways in which experience of making Pay Up invites reflection into pleasures and discomforts of interactive performance. (5) In particular, I would like to consider how a raucous performance piece marked by everyday victories and disappointments of simple consumer choices might somehow also open out onto something as unlikely as tragedy--how existentialist dramaturgy of Sartre as well as classical poetics of tragedy might be mobilized to treat an interactive performance in which spectator has become protagonist. Finally, I want to offer proposition that an emancipated spectator (in frequently cited formulation of political philosopher Jacques Ranciere) might also be a tragic spectator, following Sartres observation that the chief source of great tragedy--the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles, of Corneille--is human freedom. (6) At first glance Pay Up does not appear to adhere to any traditional understanding of tragedy. When an audience member enters all-white, brightly lit warehouse space that houses Pay Up, he or she is given white elastic booties to wear (to preserve white floor), a map, and five crisp green dollar bills. Throughout space, immaculately designed by Anna Kiraly, are eight small performance cubicles, and at designated times audience members are invited to spend their money to gain entrance to these cubicles to witness short scenes. These scenes are about handling money, primarily concerning (real-life) Yale economist Keith Chens efforts to teach capuchin monkeys to use currency. (7) In addition to eight cubicles, there are several black market scenes, performed in unfinished hallways and dimly lit bathrooms, and two large musical-theater-style dance numbers that are offered to audience as a whole at no charge. Although scenes connect to one another, they are not segments of one coherent linear narrative, nor is it possible for any single audience member to see them all without attending show more than once. The inspiration for this configuration of piece came early in creative process, when Dan Rothenberg, director of show and one of artistic directors of Pig Iron, brought in psychologist Barry Schwartzs book The Paradox of Choice, which argues that increased consumer choice tends to produce anxiety. (8) We wanted to see if we could establish rules of play, modeled on ordinary consumer experience, that would provoke that kind of anxiety in theater. Indeed, Pay Up feels like a game, perhaps more so than a piece like Punchdrunk's immersive hit Sleep No More, in part because certain individual choices are raised to status of moves, isolated into quanta of irreversible financial transactions. (9) This invites spectator to adopt a strategic mentality--how can I maximize my experience? But in its finale Pay Up directs its attention to each audience members real-life decision to attend Pay Up, and inevitable opportunity costs of that decision, not just in terms of money, but in terms of time. Self-determination always comes at a price--as Terry Eagleton writes about tragedy: term self-determination also suggests setting limits to ones liberty in act of exercising it, diminishing self in process of realizing it. …

The phenomenon of imagination plays an important though ambiguous role in philosophy and psychology. In this article, we describe its prereflective aspects, elucidating a form of imagination with defining consequences for our every experience. We lean on the epistemological framework developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his book, Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2012), and argue that prereflective imagination can affect perceptual experiences in specific ways: it signifies an awareness of potential variations of our phenomenological field. This variability affects how we experience our perceptual field as meaningful. By discussing both perception of ordinary objects and experiences of art, we show how the latter involve prereflective imagination to a greater extent than ordinary perception. Our awareness of the difference between imaginary engagement in these experiences both enhances the theoretical clarity of the phenomenon of imagination and is a necessity if we wish to understand the psychological meanings arising from experiences of imagination.

In accounts of strong experiences with music, the experience is sometimes described with words such as ‘magical’, ‘mysterious’, ‘supernatural’, or ‘extraterrestrial’. The narrator feels as if he/she is put in a trance or ecstasy, there may be a feeling of totally merging with something bigger and of glimpsing other worlds or existences. These are examples of transcendental experiences (from the Latin transcendere = to exceed, surpass), that is, experiences that go beyond what is considered as ordinary perception and experience. This chapter presents a selection of accounts that can illustrate such transcendental experiences in connection with music. It is, of course, self-evident that these are hard to put into words. Often, such descriptions are restricted to one or several expressions of the type above, perhaps with the addition of an image or a metaphor. One can also count so-called ‘out-of-body experiences’ as transcendental experiences.