Graduate Student Conference Keynote - Carl Gelderloos

Sense perception and the sense of a self from Mach to Plessner
In famously declaring the Ich to be unsalvageable, Ernst Mach established a primacy of sense perception over the self, with wide ramifications for epistemology, psychology, and the relationship of the subject to its environment, not to mention for modernism and popular culture. The analytic approach announced by the title of Mach’s 1886 Analyse der Empfindungen dissolves experience down to its irreducible atoms, the “elements” of sense perception; in its broadside against the idea of a unitary self and a unitary consciousness, Mach’s book sharpened his contemporaries’ attention to the fragmentary, contingent, and emergent qualities of human perception, knowledge, and experience. So how is one to make sense of Helmuth Plessner’s attempt, four decades later, to systematize precisely the unity and meaningfulness of sensory perception in his book Die Einheit der Sinne (1923)? In this book, Plessner is thinking about the same problems as Mach—the relationships between self and environment, mind and matter, evolution and consciousness, as well as the relationships between the disciplines—albeit from a very different angle. This lecture seeks to bring Plessner and Mach into conversation with each other, in order to think about this trajectory in the historically shifting relationship between sense and self, and to consider the importance of theories of perception for modernism.

To learn more about Professor Carl Gelderloos visit his faculty page at Binghamton University