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ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the meaning of the smile and how various kinds of disruptions motivate its thematization. In so doing, it broaches experiences in the recent pandemic, as the masked face disrupts the givenness of the smile. Indeed, the paper claims that such a situation affords the possibility of becoming even more attentive to the conditions of meaningfulness at a global scale. It evidences such a claim by first tracing some essential points of the meaning of meaning via the analysis of intentionality in the work of Edmund Husserl and Bernard Lonergan; then, it reviews the classic treatment of the smile’s meaning by Frederick Buytendijk, along with Lonergan’s further clarification of how an pre-thematic or elemental relation between persons conditions the phenomena; it concludes by suggesting how various sorts of disruption might motivate the smile’s thematization, especially in phenomenology’s inquiry back to the elemental dimension of meaning.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This is put in various ways, in various works, but see, e.g., Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §24: “In the broadest sense, evidence denotes a universal primal phenomenon of intentional life, namely as contrasted with other consciousness-of, which is capable a priori of being “empty,” expectant, indirect, non-presentive the quite preeminent mode of consciousness that consists in the self-appearance, the self-exhibiting, the self-giving, of an affair, an affair- complex (or state of affairs), a universality, a value, or other objectivity, in the final mode: “itself there,” “immediately intuited,” / “given originaliter”.”
2 See, Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 105: “But it is important to keep this in mind from the very beginning, and not as an empty generality: that the cognitive life, the life of logos, indeed like life in general runs its course in a fundamental stratification. (1) Passivity and receptivity … . (2) That spontaneous activity of the ego (the activity of the intellectus agens …)”
3 See, e.g., the “Translators Introduction” to Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, esp., xxxviii–xliii. As this reference suggests, there are further points of complexity in Husserl’s analyses of the passive sphere, including matters of individual and communal historicity, sedimentation, and so on.
4 That is to say, the body has a leeway of possibilities in its movements, in its being able to move, which relates but is to be distinguished from the possibility of the “movement” or activity of the intellect, which we address further in part three. For further notes on this point, especially relating to expression, see Hilt, “The Anthropological Boundaries of Comprehensive Meaning, its Finitudes and Openness,” 263–78. Cf. also, Husserl’s language in fn. 4.
5 See, e.g., Husserl, Ideas I, 200, 291.
6 Husserl, Einleitung in Die Ethik, e.g., 8; or 120: “Indeed, there has been repeated talk of a difference in the sphere of the acts of heart, which we called valuating acts of emotion, which speaks exactly parallel to the difference between judgmental meaning [Meinen] and insightful judgment as grasping the truth itself”; also, Husserl, Einleitung in Die Ethik, 181: “But emotions mean something; feeling joy, i.e. to have joy about something, to be aware of it as enjoyable, to feel love, i.e. to be lovingly turned towards a person, value them as lovable, and so there is an evaluation in every feeling, which can be a right or wrong one, one that fits or does not fit to the object, or can be a value that sets a true value or a false one”; translations my own. We also make use of the phenomenological analyses of Anthony Steinbock, recently published in his Knowing by Heart.
7 Husserl, Einleitung in Die Ethik, esp. 73–74.
8 Cf., Husserl, Einleitung in Die Ethik, 71 and 91. We do not, of course, engage in a discussion about the relation of foundation between acts of heart and intellect. Suffice to say that, for Husserl, since the valuing intention is also “of” or “about” an object, the objectivating act is the foundation for the valuing act. We find that this is more clearly held in earlier writings than later, however, and so do not seek to untangle the complexities of his development here. Cf., e.g., Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, 255–260. We take up the issue instead, in our treatment of Lonergan's account below, though he, too, has an analogous development (cf. fn. 24).
9 For a relevant discussion of “person,” see, Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, 307–14.
10 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 57.
11 Lonergan, Method in Theology.
12 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 73.
13 See, e.g., Lonergan, Method in Theology, 31–37; for further discussion and differentiation of this account, see, Byrne, The Ethics of Discernment, esp., 241–85. Let us note here, too, that there is an important and complex development in Lonergan’s thought, insofar as he, in his later works, further differentiates the level of the heart, and so finds how loving can give conditions for understanding. For more on this nature and consequences of this development, see, e.g., Lonergan, Method in Theology, 95–121.
14 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 74–75.
15 Lonergan, Method in Theology.
16 Lonergan, Method in Theology.
17 We thus express agreement with Max van Manen, who argues persuasively for the latter’s place in the tradition van Manen, “From Meaning to Method,” 345–69,
18 Frederick Buytendijk, “The First Smile of the Child,” 15–24; here, 14. Per the translator: “This article was presented by Professor Buytendijk as his inaugural lecture at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1947.” James Edie also raises this point and problematic in an editorial note to his translation of Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 96–97, fn. 1.
19 See also discussion of the distinction of body and lived-body in Krüger, “Persons and Their Bodies,” 256–74; this in reference especially to Plessner, “De homine abscondito.” As Krüger puts it: “[W]hat it is to be a body (in German: Leibsein) and what it is to have a body (Körperhaben), --Buytendijk later explained that it was Plessner who worked out the philosophical sense of this distinction, while Buytendijk merely helped with the examples illustrating its behavior-theoretical context (Boudier 1993). In contemporary English and French discussions, Plessner and Buytendijk are virtually unknown (Krüger 1998).” This latter point is interesting because, though Lonergan was taking him seriously, reading him incorporating his analyses in his own work, he could not locate from where these came. We aim here to contribute to the fulfilment of both lacunae.
20 Meltzoff and Moore, “Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures,” 702–09; e.g., 709: “ … [W]e postulate that infants can recognize and use intermodal equivalences from birth onward. In our view, the proclivity to represent actions intermodally is the starting point of infant psychological development, not an end point reached after many months of postnatal development.”
21 See above footnote; also, Meltzoff and Moore, “Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures,” 709.
22 Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 115.
23 That is not to say that such a touch is not meaningful, of course, nor that this meaningful touch does not occur in a prior, elemental relation. Rather, it simply means to say that the smile that emerges is distinct from the sort that evidences a spontaneous sharing of joy; merely moving lips into a smile position does not constitute the meaning of a smile per se. Evidence of this may be found in the fact that one might stimulate something that looks like a smile from a sleeping infant, which occurs without conscious intention of another, without that model as described briefly above. For more nuanced accounts of such touch, see, for example, the collection Carnal Hermeneutics. One might also think of the “reversibility” of Merleau-Ponty, which essays in the aforementioned work explores as well.
24 On some observations of play of older children (those who have developed the capability of linguistic capability) and bodily relation, see, Løndal, “Barrier-Breaking Body Movements in the Afterschool Programme,” 1–17. Also, this essay points especially to Buytendijk’s work on bodily expression and how there is an empathetic dimension to its meaning, but it misses the insights into the elemental.
25 See, Hilt, “The Anthropological Boundaries of Comprehensive Meaning, its Finitudes and Openness,” 270. It is worth noting another direction to take this phenomenologically, namely, in a more ontological direction, in the genesis of the constitution of a subject into an object and vice versa; see, e.g., Novák, The Art of Sculpture, esp. 180.
26 Buytendijk, “The First Smile of the Child,” 18.
27 Lonergan, “Method in Theology,” 59.
28 Lonergan, “Method in Theology,”57. Lonergan tends to use the term “intersubjective” rather than interpersonal. If only for sake of continuity, we remain with the term interpersonal.
29 For further phenomenological analysis of these points, see, e.g., Steinbock, Moral Emotions as well as his Knowing by Heart, cited above.
30 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 32.
31 The latter is a thorny point, for, at the elemental level, all persons are worthy precisely insofar as they are persons. We address this to a further extent below.
32 Again, see Steinbock, Moral Emotions, esp. 1–12 for a brief account on the difference of givenness and the way in which the evidence of the heart relates to objectivation; on these points, especially regarding Husserl, Melle, “Edmund Husserl: From Reason to Love.”
33 One can, of course, smile at objects that are not persons—a lovely sunset, a sublime piece of art, and so on. We leave further discussion of this experience for another time, however.
34 For a contemporary phenomenological analysis of these points, see, e.g., Steinbock, Moral Emotions and his recent Knowing by Heart, chapter 3, 64–76.
35 See Steinbock, Moral Emotions.
36 Toward one aspect of this classification, consider Critchley, On Humor.
37 Or, as Lonergan puts it, we have given “an account, description, presentation of data structured by insight”; see Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 266.
38 Emmanuel Levinas has done much to bring out this sense of the “face,” of course, though we do not directly engage his thought here. See, esp., his Totality and Infinity, 194–219.
39 For much more on the point, see the work of Maren Wehrle, e.g., “Normality as Embodied Space.”
40 Lonergan, Insight, 213–16; also see, Doran, Subject and Psyche, esp. 29–31.
41 Such a lack does not, to be sure, present certain evidence for trauma; an uncanny presence of laughter can also be an indicator. Cf. some of the observations of trauma and disassociation in Keltner and Bonanno, “A Study of Laughter and Dissociation.” One might also recall accounts from women about harassment; cf. Bowman, “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women.”; for further accounts and reflection, see the collection of essays, Gender Violence, 3rd Edition: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Laura L. O’Toole, Jessica R. Schiffman, and Rosemary Sullivan.
42 Lonergan finds that, though human beings are most often engaged and interested in certain problems or projects, the questioning spirit of human intelligence is such that it transcends any specific question about this or that determinate situation. Cf., e.g., Lonergan, Insight and its companion volume, Lonergan, Understanding and Being: