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Monday, May 7th, 2007
4:38 pm	intersubjectivity 4 We need to establish a link between the spontaneity of physis and its finality, that is, its tending toward some final cause, in the traditional sense (to be clarified). My hypothesis is that what arises by itself only arises by tendency toward some telos. How this telos is to be understood, and how it attracts physis into its uprising, need to be explored. The logic behind linking physis and telos has to do with the beauty or grace with which physis transpires. Physis, on this view, is beautiful just because it is called into being or into its happening by the Good which attracts it. Physis in some sense is a response to the good and a movement of love. Physis is radiant with the good. To occur for the sake of a telos, and by the attraction of that telos—not out of sheer will or natural efficiency, but out of the good that prompts and sustains this movement—is to show the sovereignty of that telos, its power to call and move, its originality. In short, the final cause of physis establishes and sustains its spontaneity and endows it with grace, fluidity and beauty. The radiance and spontaneity of physis manifest its love for the good. [The infinite can be shown in the finite in the fluidity of its movement, the sovereignty with which the good obviously claims the being in its movement]. There is only phys-ical love where what is loved claims the things that love. As called into its being-as-love, physis belongs to what it loves more than it does to itself. The Good belongs to itself absolutely—it belongs to itself more than it does to anything else. In a secondary sense it belongs to what is different to itself, but even then, the Good only belongs to its participants insofar as they bear the Good in themselves. The Good belongs to its bearers secondarily because it is in its bearers that the Good realises its absolute belonging to itself. The Good communes with itself in its (internal) others. The Good belongs absolutely to itself and secondarily to the mediators of its self-unity.             So what reason do we have for affirming the thorough finality of physis? What if physis emerges, but does not tend toward anything? In that case physis would be driven only from within by a sort of efficiency or natural overflowing, and what would not result from physis is the coming of things into their own. Belonging would not be effected or manifested through physis. Physis, if it has a telos principle, arises just by that sort of movement of things to the places they belong. But physis without telos is dynamism and presencing without fittingness. Not even the contemplation of physis that physis happens to effect in this case would mean the belonging-together of beings and man. These would be sheerly factual—necessary, perhaps, but still brutal inasmuch as they occur without effecting the unity of what belongs together. The non-indifference of physis, its belonging to thought, means the truth, goodness and beauty of being. Physis is already a certain gift that beings bring to the Good. The flowering of things is the same as their gifting. What flowers effects its belonging-to-the-Good by flowering, by giving itself, by letting what the Good take what is Its own. What flowers allows the Good to take its place as belonging to Itself, by indwelling and shining in what flowers. What flowers gives itself up to the Good, knowing that it belongs to the Good since the Good has a claim over it as God does over places in which he comes to pass. Place gives itself to the Good that takes place there. Physis, as the place of the shining of the Good, is claimed and called into flowering by the Good that descends and indwells, transfigures and shines-through. The finality of physis must be affirmed if we are to affirm the holiness of beings, their truth, goodness and beauty, and the belonging-together of thinking man and thinkable beings. What follows from this is that the finality of beings is the condition of their thinkability. What has no mark of love or belonging has no meaning or intelligibility. The intellect only engages with what tends toward the Good, since its own being is a tendency toward the Good. What is thought and he who thinks rise together toward the Good. Being and thought help each other in their striving for the Good. It is only by mediating the striving of beings toward the Good that man moves toward the Good. We are called to care and reverence by the appearance of physis because the Good is taking place there. The Good takes place where there is a movement toward the Good. Physis, then, is not absolutely good or holy but the bearer of what is holy, like a temple, body or tabernacle. What receives the Good only has dignity, only has a claim over its being, only presents a limit to our will, by having the Good as its indwelling principle and end. For the Good is that which has absolute claim over itself, and this is one. The recipient or mediator of the Good is claimed by and for the Good. Only the Good has the authority to claim. It is only as claimed by the Good that things claim our attention and care and respect. Their claiming us does not derive from themselves. Those that stand up for their rights typically make the mistake of thinking that their claim to being, and their claim on other’s care and respect, stem from themselves—from their nature or their will. No. Persons are only dignified as children of God, as claimed by he who has the first right of claim to anything, not by voluntaristic authority, but by his absolute and dynamic self-unity—his Goodness. We have shown the direction in which our thought must go if we are to make sense of the truth, goodness and beauty of physis. We are now ready to say something about what poiesis is. Poiesis lets what strives toward the Good proceed toward the Good. In other words, poiesis allows the descent of the Good into beings. Prompted by a vision of the advent of the Good in what is beautiful, one allows the Good to come closer again by caring for that thing and showing it its beauty, or the claim that the Good has on it. Such vision and care arise out of the Good as it works inside us; only the Good can claim what is its own, so only the Good can say the beauty of things. Poiesis is the allowing of what belongs-together to unite. Poiesis allows the Good to unite with itself through difference.     6 May 1100. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
7:16 pm	intersubjectivity 3 Why all this talk of Being and truth, radiance and light? What do any of these really mean? Is all of this not just the free-play of thought with no foothold in reality?             This sort of objection is not one that can be answered once and for all. Just for now, and to begin with, we must understand the dynamics of poiesis that are fundamental to the vision of beauty and truth and that guides Heidegger’s reflections.             “Being” should be taken to mean (amongst other things) an infinite and dynamic ground or “deep principle”—it is tempting to say “Spirit” but we will make that connection later—which rises out of unknowable depths, out of its own restlessness, into certain modes of movement (presencing, giving, showing, uniting, differentiating). What it “effects” in its wondrous happening is the givenness of things to man in their meaning and spiritual significance; the openness of world with its spiritual significance to man: world as the horizon of the givenness of things; the setting-apart and tying-together of things to make world; the arousing of man into thought so that he might access beings through the medium of logos; the gathering-together of man and beings through logos. The event of Being gives all things to themselves in relation to each other and most importantly before the hands and eyes of man who is thus called into existence and thought and belonging.             What we need to pay particular attention to is the idea that this transcendental or all-grounding event, attributed to or identified with “Being”, happens of its own accord. The happening of Being is the original and deepest element for our being and thinking, of our “being there” with things in the world, the ground of possibility for our being responsible for things and others and ourselves, the horizon of our belonging with each other and with things. What we are prone to forget is that the mysterious event of Being makes possible all that is worthwhile and essential to ourselves as embodied spirits in our particular historical situations—as well as all that is regrettable and inauthentic. Being gives—or Being just is the giving of—things to us in their truth or meaning; Being opens—or Being is just the opening of—world in which we live and move and deal with things practically, ethically, intellectually, affectively and poetically. The meaningful givenness of things, originally sacred yet prone to be taken for granted and made profane, the openness of world in which things are given, the ecstatic existence of man to whom things are given—all these are one and the work of Being first of all. The givenness of things in world open to ecstatic man: this is the transcendental gift that Being gives. Givenness and openness happen wondrously, and are not to be taken for granted as simple facts or givens that call for no questioning, nor should they be attributed to the work of man. To not forget Being is to not forget that the givenness of things and the openness of world and the being-there of man (these three are one) are not simply facts or givens but are to be received and questioned. How is it that I am mindfully present in the world? How is it that we are able to think beings and handle them and speak rationally about them? How is it that beings are present as they are? To question like so, not sceptically but in wonder, is to be on the path to appreciating and thinking and remembering the founding event of Being. For Heidegger, we should not get caught up in trying to find out the “essence” of Being, or to analyse it in a metaphysical manner. There is nothing to Being except what it grounds or effects and the how of that grounding or effecting. Being is not a first being with a nature or subjective structure that causes all these effects. The “effects” of Being—which is not a good phrase, for “effect” is too metaphysical already—are not explained with reference to formal, final or efficient causes as is traditional. Heidegger does not have a metaphysical account of the Absolute that would account for what arises out of Being. Yes, he invites us to remember that the presence of beings and the presence of thinking selves arise from something more originary, and that we should take neither of these for granted. The history of metaphysics forgets Being, as does the inauthentic man caught up in dealing with things without stepping back in questioning and wonder, as does the technological comportment to beings. But to move from facing beings to facing their “ground” is not to find a metaphysical ground as described above. To account for the presence of beings and/or the presence of thinking selves in terms of the properties of a first or universal being—God, Spirit, will-to-power, or whatever—only pushes our forgetting back one step further. Being is a ground but not of the ontic or metaphysical or “theo-ontological” sort. The essences, natures or properties of any so-called grounding being would still be secondary to the founding of Being, to the original es gibt, to the groundless es spielt. Hence Heidegger’s vehement opposition to the identification of Spirit and Being, or God and Being, or esse and Being. There is a “darkness” that precedes the light-filled principles called Spirit, God, esse. These have real natures and as such are given, present, intelligible. However, their standing-in-the-light, their having form, means they cannot be original principles. The darkness, the chaos, the event, the abyss is first. To indicate such an originary element or principle or event, however, presents a particular challenge to language and thought. Hence Heidegger’s later turning to poetic and sacred performances to gesture toward the ineffable. The openness of world and presence or givenness happen of their own accord. Or better, the opening of world—the gathering together of things in a meaningful, even sacred unity-in-difference—happens of its own accord. The Ereignis is not something driven by man’s will or work or by natural or even metaphysical causes. All of these are preceded by and made possible by Ereignis. There happens a happening without ground. “There” happens—where? Everywhere and nowhere. When? From out of a source prior to or deeper than time. Ereignis gives time and opens place, so to ask when and where of it is to make a category mistake. Being happens; Being is the happening of things, or better, of the “open” in which things are given. The happening of things of Being’s own accord is the source of wonder. Ereignis calls man to a certain reverence, mindfulness and care in response to the givenness of the given. Heidegger invites us to wonder, mindfulness and care, and seeks to open a path beyond nihilism, by showing the originality of Being or Ereignis. The happening of its own accord that is Being, is what can save us from forgetfulness, nihilism and technological inhumanity. For Being as happening is wondrous and holy—whole, healing. To think that beings are first—by, most importantly, making the ground of beings another being—is to lose that vital contact with the source of our wonder, our reverence, our care for the earth and others and things. There is a vital link, then, between the original happening-of-its-own-accord and the “aesthetic”, soteriological and normative dimensions of Heidegger’s thought (which are themselves intimately linked). The “attitudes” that Heidegger espouses and values—wonder, remembrance, mindfulness, care of the earth, letting-happen the presence of things—are not, however, attitudes that man adopts as if these orientations can be chosen out of a set of possibilities available to him by nature (Aristotle) or reason (Kant) or freedom (Hegel) and needing simply to be realised out of inner (or virtually inner) potential. Such humanism makes man, or in any case something appropriable by his autonomy (eg. the dictates of reason or absolute spirit) the source of his norms and of his being good and true. No—to genuinely think and care is to heed the call of Being, to let happen what happens, to be simply a “midwife” for the birth of what is good (to speak with Eckhart). As an aside, this receptive aspect of his thought makes Heidegger, in a certain way, Platonic rather than Aristotelian. Being true and good for Plato is corresponding to the call of the Good and letting what is good and true take place through one. But for Aristotle it is realising one’s nature. Aristotle naturalises and humanises the source of being-good. Plato realises that being-good is the work of eros and ecstasy. However, the Good is (traditionally taken to mean) a principle that vertically transcends the world, while Being is transcendent to beings while immanent to the world, a move familiar to the German Romantics and Idealists. An immanentised Good would probably be close to what Heidegger means by Being. In a sense the Heideggerian “attitudes” are not really attitudes, for attitudes can simply be adopted. But wonder and care are modes of being-with things that simply continue, by a certain inspiration—not by copying or adequation but by a more intimate mediation that tempts me to call it “participation”—the original and holy movement of Being. Thus inspired or responsive, Being happens of its own accord, but here most fully in and through man, which is what Being’s destiny was all along. Happening-of-its-own-accord arouses wonder and engenders care. But why should this be so? Why should the rising-to-presence of beings be wondrous? Why should the being-given of beings mean their radiance? What is so sacred about physis? Why should that which arises out of itself claim our attention and thought and call for us to give it space and let it be and shine? To answer these questions we need to understand what it means to be claimed. Being, and therefore beings inasmuch as they bear Being, make one into one who exists for Being, who belongs to Being and is in some radical sense Being’s own. Or better, Being is this call, and existence is just this being-called. The call of Being is the essence of the radiant and wondrous presence of beings. Being claims and makes us its own. Hence for us to correspond to and shepherd Being is not something that we can be proud of as if we chose such a vocation. There is something very similar going on here to Christ’s “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” Heidegger would have no time for do-gooders. What is good happens—in and through us yes, but it is delusional to think that what is whole and worthwhile is enacted by us. I cannot say—look what I did, aren’t I good! Whatever does have the marks of something performed by human agency rather than responsive letting-happen, is unlasting, unwhole, profane. What is good comes from elsewhere, not from the Platonic heavens for Heidegger, but still, elsewhere. It arrives as a gift from the gods exuding the perfume of divinity. It brings with it the glow of the high, the pure, the holy ether of Holderlin’s mountain peaks. To claim is to name, to set the one called apart for a particular purpose, to entrust a special task to him. “Sacred” means set apart. The one claimed exists for the sake of his task or vocation, which derives from the Latin for “to call.” If the claim is radical, then the whole existence of the one called is ordered to his mission. The claim of Being is indeed radical. The existence of man is nothing deeper or prior to his being claimed by Being, his being ordained, in a sense, to be a shepherd of Being. The existence of Dasein is simply his belonging to Being. As for the call of God: “You are Abraham, for you will be a father of many.” “You are Peter, the rock on which I shall build by Church.” “Do you love me, Peter” asked Jesus, a third time. “Yes, Lord, you know I do!” “Then shepherd my sheep.” Those called by God are named and set apart to do the work of God, which is to say, to actively let God’s work take place through them. The sons and daughters of God belong to God for they have been entrusted with God’s work—building the kingdom of God. But this is not done with just human power: “Unless God builds the house, the builder builds in vain.” However, it is still admitted here that it is a human builder who builds when God builds the house, although the primary agency is God’s. Without denying the need for conversion and work that is stressed in the Gospels, we can see there much allusion to the spontaneous arising of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is likened to a mustard seed that grows of its own accord to become the largest of all trees, to yeast that leavens bread, to a field that flourishes into plenty without the farmer knowing how. Those called by God are, existentially speaking, stewards of God’s creation and creative work. They take care of what grows of its own accord, they administer it to others, they create the conditions in which what is good grows, they protect it from adverse conditions (rocks, brambles, the birds of the parable of the scattered seed). In short, those called tend to the seeds and plants that are God’s presence in the world. To tend is the mode of their existence. They are not primary agents, but secondary, mediating agents of what arises by its own accord (by God’s creative presence). There are of course important differences between the Christian God and Being in Heidegger. Tending to other human beings in their human needs, or celebrating their presence in communion, is not incompatible with Heidegger, but is not focussed on by him. Compassion and communion, are, however, central to the Gospel message. Praxis and communio inform the Christian ethos, by virtue of its Judaic roots perhaps, while Heidegger as a German tends to fixate on the (externally rather than inwardly looking) contemplative and the nature-centred dimensions of spirituality, which are certainly compatible with the Christian ethos but with a different emphasis. God is vertically transcendent, and immanent in a qualified sense, Being is immanently transcendent. There is a tendency to (nature-focussed, not internally-focussed) quietism in the later Heidegger which in the Christian world would be suspected of heresy or at least of needing tempering. There is a Romantic yearning and sense of loss, and a tragic affectedness by the finality of death in Heidegger that is incompatible with Christian hope in the life to come. Linked to this, there is a sense that chaos and conflict and the indeterminate are prior to or at least on equal footing with form and the true and good for Heidegger (as for the Greeks), whereas for Christianity the Good and the True reign supreme; the infinite is not prior to form but perfect form, and if there is chaos or evil that is a privation of being due to original sin rather than an original or equiprimordial principle. In the earlier Heidegger there is a Promethean voluntarism that does not sit at all well with Christianity. Most of all, Being is not personal, while God is. {Also aesthetics in Christianity includes ugliness of poverty and the Cross.} Notwithstanding all of this, the tending to God’s work to which God calls one, and the shepherding of Being to which Dasein is called, have a certain isomorphism. Being happens, and we are called to actively let it happen. The kingdom of God grows like a seed, and we are called to tend to its growing. In both cases, the call sets one apart to tend to what is good and what arises with a certain spontaneity that arouses wonder and care. The holiness or goodness of what is good is inseparable from its happening by itself (by the overshadowing presence of God in one case, to be sure, but such grace is still graceful). What is good shows itself as good, as wondrous and precious and fragile, just because it shows itself as arising out of itself. Wonder and care respond to the physis of what has “life”. The radiance of what arises from depths out of its own accord is the same as the claim that such a precious thing makes on us. To see the physis of beings is just to be affected by the call to care for that physis. It is as if physis whispers with a gentle authority-and-vulnerability, “I am coming into the light—help me.” The call disarms us; we are entrusted with the creative task of allowing physis to flourish and shine and speak. What calls? What is fragile and precious and holy? What comes to the light of its own accord. But why should the will-to-light of what rises into truth, have a certain authority and sovereignty even in its smallness and fragility—nay, precisely in such vulnerability—such that it claims in itself—not by decree but in essence—the right to be and shine, and therefore our care? What is the link between will-to-light and preciousness (which is the source of the call and therefore of man’s existence)? What is suggested is that the will-to-light is absolutely good. What rises into presence genuinely, must be made way for. An ought flows immediately out of its becoming. This ought, however, is erotic, and not a simple matter of duty. That is why it is better to say “call”, which still evokes the beautiful (to kalon) and thus desire. Yet the eros at workis not simply sensual or self-centred or “oral”. Here wanting-to and feeling-responsible-for coincide. A mother’s care especially exemplifies such unity of desiring and being-claimed. The absolute goodness of the will-to-light: why? (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007
6:25 pm	intersubjectivity 2 The belonging-together of self and other is to be understood in the light of the belonging-together of Being and person. The person is to be taken both as “object”—as the other in whom Being is seen to shine—and as “subject—the self to whom Being is given and experienced (through the presence of beings, most particularly the other). Being and person belong together in both of these ways (in the person-as-object/other, in the person-as-subject/self) which are intimately tied (belonging-together is therefore triune). Being dwells and shines in the other, and this event of truth takes the self that regards the radiant other, as its dative and place. Being and person belong together both exteriorly and interiorly.             But what could belonging-together mean? First, belonging-together is a relation of intimacy between two terms. It takes difference for there to be belonging-together. The belonging-together of the different terms may well be the same as their difference. Second, there is more reason than not to believe that only terms that have a substantial or natural or formal sameness can belong-together. Like attracts like. Heidegger takes Parmenides to mean that Being and thought are “the same”. They differ by perichoresis, arising together in relation to each other, not as separate beings that must then be brought together, but as correlates in the one dyad. Their difference, or the happening of their differing, is only possible in their “sameness” and affinity; their sameness and difference are two aspects of the one event of unity-in-difference, their belonging-together.             The clearest illustration of the logic behind the thesis that only the same can belong together, is to be found in the theology of grace. Karl Barth made sense of the dynamics of revelation in Trinitarian terms, and at the same time theologised about the Trinitarian differences-in-unity in terms of revelation. God gives God as truth to God, that is, God reveals God to God. God the Father is the one who reveals, and takes the nominative, God the Son is the one who is sent, the one through whom the Father is revealed, and takes the accusative, and God the Spirit is the one who receives the Son as the revelation of the Father, and takes the dative. This work of revelation is one and triune; at each moment and in each divine person it is enacted by the one divine being. Revelation is wholly divine activity—the nominative, accusative and dative of revelation are all divine, necessarily—and can therefore only be effected in and by the divine persons, the three hypostases of God, distinct in person (by relation) while the same in substance.             However unique Barth’s position is so far, the assertion about faith that it grounds is a universally Christian one. The act of seeing and accepting Jesus Christ asthe Son of God is possible only by grace. More precisely, the act of receiving God’s revelation in the form of his incarnate Son is the interior work of the Holy Spirit. Barth, however, adds that it is the unique role that the Spirit has in the immanent Trinity—that of receiving the eternal revelation of the Father through the Son—which is extended economically to the inner life of the believing Christian, that grounds and makes sense of her act of faith-by-grace. But the claim that the act of faith or the vision of Christ as the Son of God is made possible by the inner presence of the Holy Spirit is not controversial for Christians.             Now there is an important logic behind the Christian claim that is only by grace or the infusion of the Holy Spirit (these basically amount to the same thing) that one can see and accept the divinity of Christ. The logic is that only God can see and know and love God as God. The traditional understanding of all three theological virtues is embedded in the same logic, in fact. Faith, hope and charity take God as their object, and since it is only God that is proportionate to his own divinity, the acts of faith, hope and love must be acts of God in the soul. How these can also be free acts of the human person is a complex theological affair with a long history, which we need not go into here.             Only God is the same as God. God alone has in himself that affinity and equality with God that is needed for there to be noetic and volitional unity with God. Ultimately, only God knows God, and only God loves God. Eckhart knew this when he claimed that God is the “ground” of the soul and the “ground” of one’s union with him. In my knowing God, it is God who knows himself. In my loving God, it is God who loves himself.             For Parminedes/Heidegger, Being and thought are the same. Can we detect the same logic here? Can we say also that Being gives Being to Being, that Being reveals Being to Being? Thinking is different to Being, but it is not dualistically opposed to or located outside of Being. Thinking must be the work of Being in Dasein, for only Being is one with Being. Only insofar as man concedes to the call of Being and is taken up into the element of Being is his thinking true thinking, thinking that corresponds to Being by being the “same” as Being. While faith is a theological virtue for Christianity, thinking is an ontological virtue for Heidegger. The believer knows God just by being animated by God; Dasein thinks Being by being animated by Being. The believer is given a new existence under the power of God, and is thus made to see. The thinker is given a new existence under the power of Being, and is thus made to wonder. The (hidden) parallels should not shock us. The philosophical appropriation of theological and mystical thought, particularly where these have monistic tendencies, has extensive precedent in German thought, especially in Romanticism and Idealism. More generally, we should not be too surprised if the same structures of thought manifest in different places if they have truth. Being, or the matter to be thought, has universal insistence. Recall also that Heidegger was a seminarian. We shall see further that, at least for our purposes, it is no real strain to think with Barth and Heidegger at once (with Eckhart between, and another…). Curiously, Barth’s anti-philosophical and anti-pagan vigour is no hindrance here. For the Swiss’s Trinitarian theology of revelation is still German, spiritual and, well, ontological.   To belong together is to be different and the same. If Being belongs in the other as the light that dwells and shines there, then Being and the other must be different and the same. But only (a hypostasis of) Being is different from and the same as Being. Only Being is one with Being; only Being belongs to Being (we are in Parmenides and Plotinus territory). Therefore the other must in some sense be (a hypostasis of) Being, a place where Being dwells in company with itself. And if Being belongs in the self who sees the other’s radiance, then Being and the self must be different and the same. Again, the self must in some sense be (a hypostasis of) Being, a place where Being dwells in company with itself. (Hegel peeks through the curtain. Heidegger shoos him off). Hence Being-as-such belongs in, takes place in, Being-as-other and Being-as-self. These takings-place are not self-complete but are dynamically ordered to each other. Being’s dwelling in the other is radiant and is thus completely ordered to generating its dwelling in the self who sees and reflects the other. Light gives birth to light. Being’s dwelling in that self is in turn the impulse to re-generate Being in the other by affirming him as bearing Being—and reflecting self—beautifully. The other’s radiant presence, and the self’s ecstatic vision and affirmation, are two correlated moments of the one play of Being with itself. It is Being that gives and reveals itself to itself through the beings in which it dwells and comes to light, in the persons in whom it is known. It is only as hypostases of Being that self and other (i) are fit sites for Being’s belonging and happening, and (ii) belong together, in and with Being, the principle of their sameness-and-difference. Shall we then say that Being proceeds wondrously through its hypostases to reflect upon itself into mediated self-unity?  (Whoa, hold on! What are you doing? What monster are you creating? A chimerical synthesis of Eckhart-Hegel-Heidegger-Barth? These do not belong together and cannot, should not be made into one! The last two especially, and their followers, reserve the right to stake out their ground apart from all the others! They say: How dare you tear down our fences, without which we are nothing! But what if a single matter for thought rises to thought even through such opposed thinkers? What horrifies you is not the vision of the chimera but the vision that at bottom these are already the same. Your opposites, against which you defined yourself—these were always you! What is laid bare is the original and continual identity of yourself and your Other—exactly what you cannot bear if you are to maintain your opposed identity.)   Leave: Heidegger. Exasperated muttering heard off-stage. Enter: Heidegger. Stands awhile in silent discomfort. Hegel: I am your Father. Heidegger: (in Angst) Noooooo! Hegel: The Spirit is strong in you, my son. Come to the light side. Heidegger: No. The darkness comes first.   Curtain.     1500. 1 May. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 30th, 2007
2:15 pm	intersubjectivity, 1 For centuries, philosophers of intersubjectivity (Fichte, Hegel, Buber, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray and Ricoeur, to name just a few) have been saying that the self only comes into full being in relation with the other. This insight has found many expressions: Absolute Idealism, phenomenology, hermeneutics and Trinitarian ontology, as well as theorists of psychology and sociology, have all drawn upon it and interpreted it in their own fashion. A good way to make sense of this interdependence of self and other, and a fruitful way of bearing out its meaning and implications, is by showing that to be in relation to the other is to come to be in the other, and to allow the other to come to be in oneself. Mutual being-in, or co-inherence shall be our entry point for the task of making sense of the intersubjective situation. This approach is hardly new. Theologians have used the Greek word perichoresis and the Latin circumincession to speak similarly of the mutual constitution and abiding of the divine persons. Marcel noted how deep and central to the mystery of belonging-together is the relation signified by the preposition “in”. Irigaray indicates the mystery of eros and reciprocity in terms of the receiving of the other into the self-as-place. There is much to be gained from Heidegger here. True, his focus is not the relation between self and other persons, but the belonging-together of self and Being. However, we can learn from Heidegger’s understanding of man as the “Da” (there) of the happening of Being. It is given to Dasein to be open to the shining presence of beings, to receive beings in their mysterious truth, to attend to the call of Being as it arrives gracefully in and through beings. The truth (rising into presence) of beings and the event of Being happen by taking Dasein in the dative. It is given to man to let Being happen, or put more concretely, to let things rise into being. To speak authentically is to call things into the open where they can appear in their element as what they are. To create authentically is to fashion something in love and set it into the open where it can be seen and cherished as a unique bearer of Being. To say and to create is to call something into the open where its preciousness is clear, where its bearing of Being to us is released into possibility, where its power to call us is allowed to arise. To say and to create is to let what is made and called to rise and gain a graceful power over us, to let Being take its place in what is called and thus take place in us who contemplate and receive it. Such making and setting-into-the-open, and such listening to what speaks through what has been made or said, is not primarily the work of man. Being itself rises to presence, Being itself seeks its presence in the being that is to be created, Being itself emerges into its truth through the beings that are said. We must let Being work in our saying and making if they are to be authentic and worthwhile, if they are to draw us further into the mystery of Being and thus into the depths of our spiritual existence. Beings claim our attention and care insofar as Being comes to presence through them. We attend to and care for—and are moved to love—what shines with the radiance of truth, of what calls us into depth and mystery. Beings take place in us just by calling and moving us by virtue of the Being that they each bear beautifully. The taking place of Being (and of beings) in us is the same as our being-drawn into ecstasis. The taking place of beings in us is the same as our own ongoing transportation into the Being they bear. We are drawn toward Being—and at the same time held apart from Being—and in this allowing Being to arrive in us, the being is given to itself. For the being is simply a bearer of Being. As we see the grace of Being arise in the thing, and poetically affirm the Being of that thing, we are indeed seeing and effecting the belonging-together of Being and that thing, and in that way, discovering and performing our own belonging with Being (and beings). Only man is open to the event of Being. Thus only man can give each being to itself, although this giving should be seen as the letting-happen of Being’s own event or giving. When we see beings as beings, when we give them time to affect us, when we wonder about them, when we name them creatively and lovingly, when we create them and thus set them into the open from whence they can be seen and heard—whenever we stand before a being and let its unity with Being become clear to us and in us and through us, we let beings be, we give beings to themselves. Now the unity of a being with Being is not an ontically real relation to be accessed through metaphysics, much less natural science. For the indwelling of Being in things is not an ontic state or event “out there” but one whose place is the being-there of Dasein. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The taking-place of Being in beings is not an “objective” event but is rather truth-and-beauty, which takes place in the spirit aroused by such a vision or call. This is not a retreat into a (certain caricature) of Absolute Idealism, but an affirmation of the “ideality” or “spirituality” at the heart of the real, where real is no longer taken in opposition to ideal (an insight of Absolute Idealism). The humanly resonant meanings of things, the spiritual significances of beings, are not added extraneously to them, as if it would take a detached pure science to access the hard reality of things. In this sense, phenomenology does not (or need not) return “merely” the phenomenal effect that things have on us as human beings. To be is just to bear Being, and thus to have intrinsically spiritual significance that waits to be received. This bears even on the so-called ontic or natural properties of things. The ontic-ontological distinction should not be taken to mean that ontic properties do not bear the ontological, otherwise we end up dividing the being into ontic and ontological, which amounts to a denial that Being comes to presence in beings precisely in their concrete fullness. To attend to the phenomenal effect things have on us—not according to the rather dry objectivity of some parts of Husserl, but according to a more rich and versatile receptivity that includes religiosity—is already to see what things are. And things are not, in their truest element, atoms or primary substances but rather: lilies, monuments, mothers, grapes, elephants, rain-clouds and symphonies—the stuff of poetry, not metaphysical analysis. The point is that none of the qualities that mark out these things as what they are, are separable from the significance they have for man, even though they are essentially tied to natural properties (grapes do not make good lilies or mothers or symphonies, for they do not have the right nature).   Lilies: pure and fresh, symbols of virginity, gifts of the valley. Monuments: strong, tall, comforting, guardians of memory, gateways to the past. Mothers: tender, loving, nurturing, suckling, brooding, delighting. Grapes: fruit of the vine, gift of the earth, bringer of joy. Elephants: curious and fascinating, comical and graceful, tender and awesome.  Rain-clouds: welcome or unwelcome, promising or threatening. Symphonies….!   Remembering that the truth or meaning of things is not added to them extraneously but is essential to what it means for them to be, we can see that things do not take place simply “out there” but are embedded in a world of significance that is opened up by (or for or as) the existence of man. It is true that Being gives beings to themselves and to us (both at once). It is also true that we let Being so give, by seeing each thing’s unique unity with Being. In our hearing and seeing and saying and being-affected, Being is allowed to unite with each being and beings are given themselves as beings, as sites of truth. Since the relations essential to each being as a being are ontological or spiritual ones rather than simply natural or ontic ones, and since it is just these relations or significances that have an intimate bearing on the spirit of man, the truth that man is the “there” for beings (and Being) only makes sense if we give primacy to the ontological or spiritual element. But to analyse the qualities of, say, a rose and reduce those qualities to secondary qualities that merely result from our sensory and psychological apparatus in interaction with the primary qualities of the “rose”, is a different thing. Here the object called a “rose” only occurs in the subjectivity of man, and is therefore not really a rose. If, however, we give Being or spirit primacy, the rose is really a rose (“really” in a more holistic sense), and the stuff of the real is the stuff of poetry. This is indeed to subordinate the natural or ontic to the spiritual or ontological (the former as mediating the latter, much like in the Catholic understanding of sacrament). The events and givings and mediations of Being and spirit are the ground and horizon of the events and states of the material world (including ourselves). This is also to discover that being true to our experience of things is the same as really encountering things. Aesthetic escapism is not required: the world is indeed wondrous. Such aestheticism simply admits the same opposition of subjectivity and objectivity that modernity created and that Heidegger (and Hegel) dismissed. Affirming the primacy of Being allows us to affirm and make sense of the fact that beings take place in us in an important sense—that is, as having sense. Our next move is to draw an analogy—and to therefore acknowledge the difference as well as the similarity—between things as bearers of Being and persons as bearers of Being. With this bridge in place and attending still to the element of Being—now understood as that light in which each person is given as a bearer of Being—we will be able to appreciate what it means to let the other take place in oneself.   1700. 30th April 2007. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
4:29 pm	review of thesis progress/direction Key terms/concepts organising Notes on Belonging: 1. Being, Birth, Belonging, Bearing Indwelling, Radiance Perichoresis, Gift, Eros, Life 2. Poiesis, Spirit, Dialogue Ekstasis Absolute, Infinite Celebration Symbol, Presentation 3. Epektasis Interdependence Incipience, Repetition Community, Compassion Joy, Delight Obsession Exposure, Wounding, Tenderness Universal, Good List of pertinent thinkers: English: *Desmond, *Milbank, Crosby. Nouvelle Theologie: Schindler, JP2, VB, Hanby, De Lubac, Schmitz Russian: ~Zizioulas, ~Hart, Betz Traditional: Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Maximus, Nyssa German: Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, *Scheler, *von Hildebrand, *Pieper, *Otto, Buber. *Pannenberg, Scheeben. French: ~Marcel, Irigaray, M-P, Nancy, Marion, Henry, Chretien, Ricoeur. *Able to be systematically studied. ~central thinkers. Reciprocity themes to compare. Applications/manifestations of perichoresis: Dialogue, dialectic, belonging, gift, love, play, appearance, community. Possible theses: Scheler and Otto and/or Schlerimacher on feeling and sacred. Scheler on relation between love and pheneomenology of good. Scheler and Gadamer on dialogue. Hegel and Gadamer: spirit and dialogue. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
4:15 pm	belongingnotes1 Notes on Belonging—end of Summer 2007. 21 February A being with ontological dignity does not merely have his existence, but bears it proudly as “something” that belongs to him, that befits him, and over which he has some claim by virtue of his essence. This is different to a neutral thing which exists but has no (or little) claim to its to be, and which demands no respect. Such a thing could fade out of existence without the breaking of any sacred bond between itself and its to be. To be is not granted to it in any way that gives it the sort of weight that calls for acknowledgement and respect—its essence is too impoverished to receive its to be with any dignified claim. In only a minimal sense, only to a minimal degree, does it lay claim to its to be, such that to be would continue [BT1] to infuse it as a recipient to which it gravitates by a certain decree of justice. In short, given that it is, the necessity with which to be takes up a rightful dwelling there is faint.             If we are to avoid theological voluntarism—in which no possible act or creation of God is more fitting that any other, since no act or being claims to be with any more attraction than any other—and nihilism, we must suppose that “essence has an essence”: that since some determinations are more open to to be than others, there must be a mysterious rule that ranks ways-of-being according to how well to be fits in them, and therefore also an ideal essence to which to be belongs perfectly and absolutely, the prime exemplar of such belonging and of all essences. This essence would be supremely possible and the source of all possibility—not to say that such a possibility is never realised, or that possibility precedes actuality. On this vision, if it is granted that to be belongs (however weakly) to finite beings—an affirmation that would follow from seeing the goodness of beings—then it must be granted that to be belongs first and most perfectly to an absolute essence. More precisely, to affirm the goodness of beings, that to be belongs to them, is already to affirm that there is a mysterious rule by which to be belongs to whatever it can reign in, according to the strength of its reign there. Without (implicitly) affirming this dimension or principle of to be’s belonging, which opens up the scale of goodness and beauty, nothing could be affirmed in its goodness[BT2] . It makes no sense to say that a being is good if there is not some (pervasive yet elusive) rule [the ethos?] that determines what is more and less good. In short, to genuinely affirm something as good is to implicitly affirm the supreme good, while to go astray and affirm the goodness of what is not, or the betterness of what is less good, is to implicitly colour God or the Good badly. One cannot affirm a single thing as good without making some claim, however indistinct and revisable, about what goodness is, and thus setting up a scale of goodness. (Still, things are incommensurable…).   What is good in itself?             In considering what is good the heart melts. In considering how my parents gladly spent themselves for me, I am humbled and moved to gratitude, praise and protectiveness—I would not have anyone say a bad word about them nor would I have anything harm them. I am moved to uphold them in mind and word and to keep them and their goodness in existence. Not that the goodness they have already performed and displayed is not complete in itself—I would not demand that they keep being good to make up for any previous lack. Rather, I would keep appropriating to them the goodness they have already done. [Endowment](In this way they are empowered to repeat their being-good). I am moved to defend and protect they who have given themselves for me. In giving themselves they have bared themselves vulnerably. To see that my parents care so much is to be moved to care for them. Their woundedness in being moved to care for their children, when seen, is wounding (we are moved to see the same thing, and in sharing the same vision, are wounded by it together). Thus is it their ecstasis—their selflessness, their radical other-centredness which is not just external word or action but proceeds from a certain tenderness—that shows itself as good, bringing one to a corresponding ecstasis and tenderness.             This suggests, and finally even shows, that goodness is someone’s (or something’s) other-centredness, the way her life flows from and to the other—the other is everything for her, she would do anything for him—that way she exists as a person and is yet wholly from and for another (beauty when another is everything for her; music, song).Goodness: the ecstasis of what is, the relationality of that which indeed has its being but bears it as flowing from and to the other.             Such a state of being melts the heart when seen, and especially when it takes oneself as its dative (in facing one, one is moved to turn into the dative what has faced one and made one into the dative, to continue the other’s goodness by inverting its direction, singing the same song). What is good is that which calls us to affirm its goodness, with an affirmation that is itself good—showing the other as good. What is good is what shows me that I am good by its glad self-offering, which expresses a tender- loving vision. What is good in itself is what highlights what is good outside it. What is good is good just by receiving from and giving to the other-as-good. To be good in itself is to be in relation to good. Goodness: the perfect union of simple and relational being. [dialectic of perception, and force and the understanding in Hegel?]. [might jump from here to Good as medium uniting both modes of being…]             The union of being-in-itself and being-from-and-for-others I shall call luminosity. To be wholly a medium is to be full of light. Light shows things to themselves—as things full of light, things that show things to themselves. In the circulating light, beings show themselves to each other as they who show each other to each other….             To what arch way-of-being does to be supremely belong? To be belongs to that which is wholly in-itself and in-relation, whose being-in-itself is wholly spiritualised or relationalised. But to be in relation is to receive to be and give to be from the other. Therefore to be belongs where it flows through, belongs only where its belonging elsewhere is accepted and realised.             The name for what resides and belongs by going through is life. To be, as life, belongs to what lives, to what gives life and receives life from another to whom to be belongs, to what inspires and expires. Life belongs dialectically. To be belongs to at least two; one cannot simply affirm the belongs of to be to one.             The arch way-of-being is Life, being-in-self by being-in-another (taken as universal? Ref to sensation in Hegel?). To be supremely belongs to the way-of-being called life—it is life itself. Life claims its to be as its own; it simply is to be, since to be is life, and life is to be. Life is and shows itself as what is supremely good, that to which to be (itself) primally belongs. Life has the highest dignity and is the source of all dignity. Life is the Good. [ref interpenetration and Good in Ps.Dionysius, in poiesis article?]             Life is absolutely possible. Life is the only absolute, the only principle that coincides with itself, bearing no contradiction in itself. Everything else, if made into its highest principle, bears impossibility in itself, a tendency toward failure and death. Life: the infinite ground and horizon of all.   To be belongs to him whose to be belongs to others.   What can bring itself into being? That to which to be belongs. Life alone can give itself, since it belongs to two. Whatever is to have life—in the relation of mutual belonging within life’s belonging-to-itself—can call for its expression or ‘being’. Whatever lives and shelters us in belonging is what can be said. Belonging is the first and last word, the living horizon of every genuine word.   What can be done? What sort of acts do being dwell and belong in justly and beautifully?    [BT1]Repetition?  [BT2]Against Nietzsche. (Comment on this)
3:15 pm	belongingnotes2 Monadic versus living existence.   On what condition(s) does the existence of the ‘existent’—the metaphysical subject of existence—depend? How must its existence reside or inhere in the[BT1]  existent (or ‘as’ the existent even) if the existent is to exist? What is the manner of the dwelling of existence in/as the existent; what is the nature of the unity—even identity—‘between’ the existent and (its) existence? For instance, can there be an identity or unity ‘between’ existent and (its) existence if there is not at the same time some sort of difference, one which is not merely ‘logical’? If not, what is the nature of this difference: does it imply the existence of another existent beside the first, one which not only has existence again in the abstract but even bears the very existence of the first, as that singular existence’s ‘second hypostasis’? Might such implication precede the second existence by forming the way of being of the first existent, which is thus always already oriented toward generating (or at least affirming) the second existent?     First we must draw a distinction between existence taken as the fact of something’s existing, and existence as a dynamic principle immanent to something (more like actus, rather than factum) and in virtue of which that fact holds. It is existence in the second sense that we are interested in. Let us consider what follows if the only condition of an existent’s existence is the ‘location’ of existence in that existent, even[BT2]  such that existent and its existence are so united so as to be identical and only different according to reason (as Aquinas claims for God, in whom existence and essence are the same; God is his existence identically and exclusively: he cannot communicate this absolute manner of being to any other being). To deny that an existent comes further into the existence it already has by giving it and being received as existing, is to suppose that this existent has its existence totally to begin [BT3] with (either as generated or as the first existent), as an already finalised actuality that admits of no renewal or deepening by circulation. If existence was given it, then it was given in a single act that was finished all at once, not as a gift that promises and opens onto a life of continual deepening of giving by the necessary repetition of gift. For the existent and what gave it existence, this giving is strictly past (like Aristotle’s actuality after becoming). If, however, the giving of existence is a life of giving in which gift is renewed, revisited and repeated, then what has already been achieved must still be enacted again, such that the past is never over with, not strictly past; the present and past pass into each other while moving into the future that they imply. Existence is not at stake for what has its existence as a final actuality, it cannot participate in that wondrous and holy birth of things freshly at the origin. A God who does not receive his existence anew cannot be said to be life, nor should it be said that he is holy and glorious, or with Augustine, ever ancient, ever new. It is hard to see how love is possible for a being whose existence cannot be received anew. What could draw someone out of herself in delight and desire if she had her existence as an already stabilised actuality? Moreover, what could possibly motivate her to give? Her relating to others in vision and giving would occur beyond that wondrous time of fresh growth and holy renewal; whatever act was performed would be “post-incipient.” But such staleness is incompatible with a life of meaningful relating. Camus’ “stranger” can be seen as existing after the origin; his alienation from the life of wondrous beginnings means that he must float adrift in an indifferent cosmos. If all incipience was denied him, if there was not a moment of interaction in which was promised the birth into being, then his ennui would be so complete as to make him not there at all. Some seed of life, some promise of birth must keep the stranger alive, keep the world open for him, otherwise he would not be there to tell his story. Angst, ennui, and absurdity only show up as the turning away of the whole if the whole has been opened for one by being bathed in the light of what promises to give life. Only what has smiled upon us can appear to turn away. Strictly speaking, post-incipient relating is impossible, for the birth of existence eventuates through relation (this is relation’s living essence). If there is no giving and receiving occurring across the axis of relation, if existence does not pass as birth via relation, then relation cannot be. The being of relation is its being the path of some giving or renewal of existence, some circulation of life freshly. Relation is the interval through which life passes, or the passing of life itself. But what is separated from the origin completely—if that were possible—comes after life, and thus cannot be in relation[BT4] . But what cannot be in relation may as well not exist; it would be meaningless to assert that such an unrelating thing is (this is why the Parminedean one cannot exist). If God is to be affirmed as life, love, goodness, glory and event, then we must affirm his intimacy with the origin. Yes, we must affirm that God is the origin, but that might not be enough (depending on how this identity is (mis)understood). For if God does not also receive himself always from himself as origin, then even he would be cut off from the origin. If God’s being identical to the origin means that he does not receive himself (since he already is), then he is estranged from himself by virtue of being strictly identical to himself. It is only in the self-difference by which God eternally receives himself from himself that God can be said to be, and to be one with himself. An origin that did not receive itself, that was not intimate with the origin that it is, could not come out of itself and be an origin for others. Only what gives itself to itself by circulating itself as life within itself can give anything to others. It is here that the doctrine of the Trinity allows us to contemplate a God who circulates his life within himself; a God without internal difference could not do so, and so could not create or love. (With more analysis, it could be shown that such a god or Parminedean one could not even be). The Thomist might respond by saying that Aquinas has already accounted for this by saying that God’s esse is intrinsically dynamic. I would agree that Thomistic esse does not strictly precede the communication of esse (William Norris Clarke makes this amply clear). That is one step better than thinking that a being has its existence and then acts (which is to say, relates[BT5] ), as if existence were actualised perfectly before act. Indeed, for Aquinas, the perfection of existence coincides with the perfection of act. (On the other hand, why does Aquinas distinguish goodness and being by saying that whereas goodness as the perfection of a being is primarily said of a being insofar as it has second actuality or virtue, and is only good qua merely existing in a secondary sense, a being has existence in the proper sense before it gains virtue, which only represents existence in a second sense (it is an accident, after all)? It would seem that Aquinas’ dependence on Aristotle’s doctrine of substance as the primary sense of being is in opposition to a truly relational ontology in which beings gain being by giving and receiving being). Even putting aside these tensions, the dynamism intrinsic to esse certainly does not imply that the reception of esse by a second existent represents the increase of esse in the first existent. Another step should be taken but is not: the perfection of esse must coincide not just with the giving of esse but with its reception without. What this amounts to is that there is no final step that we can take and say that at this point esse is perfectly actualised. For if in the having of esse is implicated the other’s reception of the same esse, then even the other’s reception is only complete with my reception, and vice versa, and an endless series of givings opens up, a circulation of esse that never ends, an eternal birth of being between two. The problem with the notion of esse as traditionally thought—and there are reasons to think that the modifications that I would make to esse would make a strain on the very fabric of the word, which would resist such a change to the end, so it would be better to use another word like “life”—is that the having of esse is thought to precede the receiving of esse by another. In the metaphysics set up by esse, receiving comes completely after the giver’s giving. Again, a causal/temporal distance is set up, and the act of receiving is grounded in a fact that precedes it in the strict past of what is already achieved. But if the giver’s giving is already complete, and cannot be renewed by the receiver (who thus cannot take up the same giving to repeat it, so his gift stands outside the giving that gave out of what tragically becomes a dead past), then the two cannot genuinely relate, for as we saw, ecstasis is the birth of being, the giving and receiving of life at both ends, the coming-into-life-together. The subject of esse, according to this concept’s usage (steeped in the primacy of pure act as opposed to passivity), does not continually receive esse, and so is not alive. Life, ecstasy, relation, birth, belonging, wonder, love and beauty are at odds with esse. There is after all truth in what Heidegger and Caputo have to say about esse as an actuality akin to the standing work of the Roman artefact. Esse stands apart, alienated from the living, renewing origin. Being as the refreshing origin provoking wonder and calling into life is covered over with the substantialist language of Aquinas, however modified his metaphysics is by the doctrine of creation and participation. The situation cannot be saved by saying with Schindler that the mode of existence of God the Son is received esse. What needs to be affirmed is that existence (as life, existence is already too “ossified”) as such is only had perfectly by being given-and-received, since what circulates by nature is only had in the mode of circulating it, or rather by actively letting it circulate (poiesis). If only one mode of having esse is received esse, then another mode of having esse (God the Father’s, according to Schindler) does not require such reception as internal to it. Unless, that is, there is perichoresis between esse-ad (Father) and esse-ab (Son), which means that even the Father receives his mode of existence from the Son as he receives his own, and therefore that the modes of esse are in fact moments internal to the Father himself, since even his giving (esse-ad) is received (esse-ab). Esse-ab is then not strictly the mode of existence of the Son since it is the condition in the Father of the Father’s being-as-giving. What can be affirmed however is that esse-ab is most clearly shown in the Son, thus reflecting for the Father a receding moment of his own existence where esse-ad (giving) is emphasised but not cut off from receiving, since what he gives (his life) circulates, and prompts him to give by mediating that circulation qua circulation.             Returning to our thought experiment: the posited monad’s existence is located in or as, and is true of, this existent, simply by being there as that by virtue of which this existent is. (The “granting” of existence to this is not a moment of a more universal “granting”; its appearance here is not tied up intimately with its appearing elsewhere. “Just here” is cut off from everywhere/nowhere. Locality is purified into pure locality, one in which nonlocality does not essentially enter). Not only is this existent’s existence wholly present in this existent, buts its presence begins and ends there. Thus its existence is not caught up with any existent besides itself; its existence does not describe a path that includes and transcends this existent. The presence of this existence in the existent is not a moment of a circulating or communicating movement but is rather the “whole story” of this existence. (Possibly I could relate this to Zeno’s paradoxes?) This[BT6]  existence simply resides there, absolutely complete, totally fulfilled by its singular presence. It calls only for one host or site. The existent exists by having its existence located in/as itself, and not “also” by virtue of that existence circulating through on its way from and to other existents. (This “also” would in fact be the mode in which there is singular location at all; we should not really put an “also” between a moment and the whole).             In short, the being-here (in one “spot”) of existence is not a phase of moment of its circulation, but rather a finished state-of-affairs, complete in itself.   Granting, hypothetically, that such a monadic existence were possible, how should it be characterised? (We have already seen that it cannot genuinely relate). Could it receive itself from another, or give itself to another? In what way would such receiving/giving be constrained to occur? Let us pursue the idea that the monad is created. This would require a thought of a giving of existence that does not take up the existence of the monad in the way that a dynamic informs its moments. The monad’s existence must then be considered as a totality—not just as a whole, for even wholes can be take up into greater wholes while the respective wholeness of both is preserved (though both are modified in the process). The monad-as-totality is obviously not the sum of all existing things, but only that whose existence is not implicated in the existence of other existents or in their giving or receiving. The monad-as-totality is “existentially aloof”, even as it comes against other things (whatever that might mean after giving-and-receiving has been excluded). Its coming into contact with other things must occur in a purely neutral medium that is common to whatever things contact each other, and in which forces play outside the horizon of belonging, true relation or gift. Insofar as things in this medium, abandoned to the reckless play of neutral force, can be destroyed or harmed by the pure efficiency of matter as medium—or alternatively, increased and sustained—their existence is not an radiant expression of the good, or life-as-belonging, but is merely an effect [BT7] of force. There are those who believe this and still like to affirm that things are precious and beautiful, even saying that it is their being subject to such decay that makes them precious and beautiful. However, preciousness and beauty in this case is divorced from truth or collapses into a subjective experience without grounding in being. How the world really is (devoid of meaning, chaotic, neutral) and how the human being experiences her world (she is open to meaning, wanting to see beauty and goodness, full of wonder and eros) are divided, producing a dualism of sorts between human experience and cosmos, and between what things really are according to the cold reason of science (accidents produced by neutral force) and how we experience them. This dualism tends either toward reductivism or epiphenomenalism on one hand (beauty is downplayed as an accidental effect of the real), or tragic romanticism on the other (beauty and goodness are not downplayed, but it is subject to the power of destructive force and so is not sovereign. This is the Greek world in which truth and goodness, beauty and form radiate their sovereignty in themselves and yet when faced by chaos are subject to destruction. The space held open for the transcendentals must be held open forcefully against the elements; form must be supplemented by the neutral force which is its opposite. Form has no authority over nature. Thus Plato calls for the powerful class to police his republic; truth does not have enough force to transform the people.)             What sort of dependence can a monad have for its existence then (recalling that Leibniz’s God creates the monads)? What must be excluded here (ex hypothesi) is a donative relation between cause (eg God) and effect (monad): in the act of creation the existence of God cannot pass over to the monad as a principle that takes up a second dwelling there, a dwelling that is linked to the first as two moments of relative rest involved in a greater movement or circulation. To uphold the monad’s monadicity, its existence must be both whole and self-enclosed, and that excludes all involvement in greater wholes or dynamics that would sublate it. (Note that something can be taken up into something different without being taken up as belonging therein: consider a cyclone assuming things into its elemental force. This sort of taking-up is not what I mean). Creator and created monad do not make a dynamic whole. How then can the monad’s existence be “given” it? The passage of existence from creator to creature must be the passage of something from one totality over to another totality, and not just from one whole to another (thereby created) whole. The creation of a monad must then involve a “trans-total” movement, the traversal of the space or interval between totalities (even if this between only arises in its traversal).             Creation here cannot be a beautiful expression that flows from being. If being has a pre-belonging to what is to be created, and belongs also to the creator, then this poetic movement of being from creator to creature as from one belonging-place to another would involve both in a harmonic whole, bridging the interval between them. As Aquinas says, creatures in a sense bring themselves into being. This can only mean that it is fitting that being be given to what can be created (for being can belong to creatures too), and that creating them is not sheer force or will but poetically follows the rhythm of being as it moves toward where it might belong. Leibniz’s God cannot create poetically. This entails either (ii) below or (i) that the being given to creatures does not belong to them properly—it is instead forced upon them, bound to them arbitrarily, rather than beautifully infused so as to radiate out from within.             However, if the existence that came to “perfect” the creature were not something that took up a fitting residence there—in other words, if there were not a relation of fittingness and belonging between existence and creature (derivative of God’s belonging to himself in self-giving-and-receiving, but that is another matter)—then existence could not penetrate and permeate the created existent; neither could existence (God?) appear there in its radiant indwelling. The existent would not be enfolded in existence, yet that is the condition of existing at all. Existence is only present where it is given intimately and radically, like light in that which is lit up. But such infusion is possible only where there is a relation of fittingness and belonging between what goes in (and through) and what receives (and expressly mediates). Therefore the existence that passes into creature is not existence in the abstract, if abstract is taken to mean proper to nothing in particular. It is acceptable, however, to understand the universality of existence as its belonging to many in different ways[BT8] .             (ii) The being that comes from God into the creature does not belong to God, but only “sits” in God as a power to create, held by God as a neutral power at his free disposal, a power that is not intrinsically ordered to give itself (being) to what calls for being according to its possible essence, but is rather a pure efficiency that must be guided from without (rather than poetically from within) by the contemplation of different scenarios and choosing one. The act that is better or best cannot be decided according to what fits the orientation of power (since it has none; it is pure efficiency), but only according to what shows itself from the outside as better or worse, by considering how things appear. The choice cannot be made according to an affinitive attraction to what God’s nature-as-power prefers, but only according to what is “good in itself”, apart from anything relation to God’s nature/power.             The creature-monad to be created is not good because God’s power to create is naturally ordered to give itself to such a creature (that would mean harmony rather than monadicity), but because of its pure structure. The creature is not good because its essence is receptive to and manifests God’s power-as-true—power is here present univocally, neutral to the content that it grounds—, it merely manifests God’s power purely, in its pure sublimity (and in the past tense). What then makes a possible creature or world preferable for God? God must be committed to choosing the best world, but this commitment must not flow from God’s being as tending to express itself and so mirror back to him the belonging that being has with him. Commitment here must be a purely outgoing movement, a giving of something to what calls for it without mediating himself to himself in expressive eros and delight. God is committed to give being to what, as the best world possible, calls for being. This possible world claims being (as idea, before it exists) but does not mirror back to God his own claim to being. The best possible world does not praise God as he to whom being first belongs; it cannot be grateful for the gift of being from he who is. God has merely given over what belongs to the best possible world but does not belong to him first. Or, it might belong to him but this belonging is not increased by creating. He is a cold administrator of being, just and rational yes, but loving, no. God does not find himself in creating the best possible world (“for God saw all that he made, and saw that it was good”). He only admits of what calls for being. The giving of being is not a way of belonging to what is given. In generating, God is not generous, which requires joy in giving. Neither can such a God speak in delight to the world he creates and call it into relationship. What all this amounts to is that the belonging of being to beings is not a moment of the belonging of being to God. Only with this separation could God give being to what calls for it without entering further in delight and joy into his own being. God’s giving being to beings is not part of God’s giving being to himself (understood as his self-renewing circulation of life). But if being could belong in two places equiprimordially (not hierarchically), then God would not be infinitely good and the source of all goodness. For the absolute Good must be where being belongs first and last (since he is being by circulating being amongst himself), such that its belonging elsewhere is only a moment of the affirming of this first and last belonging. For God to create a monad or be subject to “justice” or even enact liberal generosity without self-mediating delight, would be for God to deny his absolute goodness.             Thus we can see that the self-mediation of the Good, its coming-to-itself in and through its other (what it generates) opens the generated being out of itself in existential relationality. As existing in the self-mediation of the Good, as a moment therein (yet still having an existential independence), the creature itself is ecstatic and subject to continual increases in its being. The Good is the ecstatic creature’s horizon, ground and “matrix”, the atopic life upon which it draws and in which it rises—or falls as into an abyss.             In sum, where the generation of beings is included in the self-mediation of the Good to whom being belongs first and last (everything else only derivatively, by mediating the Good’s self-belonging), beings are not monads but ek-sistents which never have their existence as a final actuality. Their life is given and at the same time withheld as something to grow into; it is given-as-withheld. That is the only way in which life as life can be present within. A totally actualised life closes the existent off in a past; for it to continue after its full actuality is for it to continue dead; life cannot be given in this way and be life. In contradistinction, the monad has its existence totally as soon as it is. Only in this way could it avoid being in relation and receiving its being continually. Eros is not possible for the monad, nor, probably, is interiority possible for it. The only way it could act is either without final cause or according to a finality that is purely reflexive, if either of those were possible. Its self-identity as a location of being is cut off from, is constituted outside, the atopicity of being-as-transcendental; in other words the universal and atopic does not shine in what is strictly local/topical/particular. Locality and nonlocality have been separated strictly. The monad, thought properly, is devoid of radiance and truth. The call of the Good from “nowhere” cannot pass in the “there” of the monad. This is another way of saying that it is dead.  [BT1]Why differentiate existence and existent: or is this exactly what we are trying to establish?  [BT2]What is the nature of the universal ‘existence’ in this case? Merely that of “realism”? ie, many existences possible but each does not have its existence in the mode of affirming the belonging of existence to others… what sort of “community” is this?  [BT3]Therefore time.  [BT4]Hence if no vertical dimension, no horizontal one either.  [BT5]But creatures are in relation by virtue of being creatures, not yet acting.  [BT6]Here could introduce topology of sites?  [BT7]Alienation; things constituted by the alien, what is not intimate/proper to them.  [BT8]See comment 2. (Comment on this)
2:22 pm	belongingnotes3 The endless dynamic of giving-and-receiving   If in giving the giver does not give the gift’s belonging to the recipient by showing the recipient that he belongs to the gift (meaning, the gift belongs to him by its nature, not just by the arbitrary decision of the giver), then he does nothing to effect the recipient’s belonging with the gift, and even hinders it. True giving smiles; the genuine giver shows his gladness in giving and shows the vision in which such a giving is born, a vision of the belonging-together of gift and recipient. In his smile the giver gives the recipient the same vision that prompts and poetically justifies his act of giving (however “unnecessary” it might be), the vision of the belonging-together of gift and recipient. If the recipient does not receive this vision, if he does not hear his name called in the giving as one to whom the gift belongs, and one whose belonging to the gift is seen before it is effected (thus the gift and recipient are in the care of the giver, and the giver finds himself already as called to give/care), and only effected by the communication of the vision, this name—if the recipient does not hear this call in the giving, either because it was not sounded (perhaps the giver was not free to show how much the other means to him), or there was no such vision of belonging to begin with, or because the recipient refuses to hear or has not yet learnt to hear, then the landing of the gift is not a receiving properly called.             For receiving is conceding to the giver’s (poetic) vision which moved him to give (a vision which is perhaps born in the giving itself?), and which is expressed in the giving and more completely in the conceding recipient since only in the latter is the giving properly enacted. [Ref to Aristotle; the agent’s act but it occurs in the patient]. To concede to this vision, this name, this proposed belonging-together of self and gift, is to continue the poetic joining-together by the giver of what is creatively seen as belonging-together, not so much according to reason or justice but simply the generous fecundity of life or being. [It is its own law, not subject to anything beyond it, it is the Good]. The liberating work of creatively uniting what belongs (recipient and gift) by being in tune with the movement of what is givable insofar as it seeks out its belonging, begins with the vision and act of the giver but only comes to fulfilment with the hearing, understanding and conceding of the recipient. Thus the movement of the gift is not a merely natural one that eventuates outside its recognition. A gift that is not seen as gift cannot effect itself as gift [opposite of Derrida, which is a good sign!]. The need of the gift to be seen in order for it to pass is what entrusts the gift to the personhood of giver and receiver, and therefore brings them into the mutual personhood for which it calls, entrusting giver and receiver to each other. The gift calls for and thus calls into being the persons-in-relation who might see and perform the gift. Vision is called into being by the gift, as that by which the gift might pass. As arising from and belonging to the gift’s passing, vision is, from the beginning, vision that is to-be-shared, vision that gathers together self and other. As tied to the gift, vision is not the act or passion of a self-contained ego, but the medium of the gift which gathers together those who agree to see the gift through. In short, to see is to see the gift through.   If the recipient is to realise the vision at work in the giver’s giving, he surely must not only agree to receive and realise the proposed union of himself and the gift. The union must be seen and realised by the recipient as a union between himself and what already belongs with the giver; the gift cannot be bound to himself as gift if its prior unity with the giver is not seen and upheld at the same time. But this requires that the recipient see the gift as belonging to the giver no less than to himself—although in a different way—and that he receive the gift by affirming the gift’s belonging wholly to the giver and wholly to himself (this is what it means to receive). Thus not only does he concede to and realise the vision that is proposed for himself: he also sees and wants to effect a vision that is coupled with the sending of the first, the belonging-together of giver and gift. The giver belongs to the gift simply by being he who gives the gift to whom it belongs. [Note the circular definition, which implies the infinity of the dynamic it represents]. The recipient, if he is awake (and that call should wake him) will see this prior belonging-together in the giver’s communication of the recipient’s belonging to the gift.             Anyway, how could the recipient accept the authority of the giver regarding the gift and so concede to his vision and giving, without seeing that the giver qua giver belongs to the gift? One cannot accept the gift as belonging to oneself without accepting the authority of the giver who proposes the unity of gift and recipient, but this authority is a prior unity of gift and giver, which must be seen and accepted as such at the same time that one’s own unity with the gift is seen and received. The giver as one with the gift in his giving shows the recipient in his giving the same thing that he sees and proposes: oneness with the gift. He calls the recipient into the fold of the gift by appearing in his unity with the gift, by exemplifying that to which his giving calls the other.             Moreover, if the recipient was not given the occasion to give the gift to whom it belongs—the giver, since he gives the gift to whom it belongs, or another third recipient/giver—then by definition it would not be granted to him to belong to the gift, in which case the gift would not properly arise. The recipient receives by hearing and fulfilling the proposed vision sent with/as the gift: the belonging-together of person and gift, and he does this only by affirming this relation simultaneously of himself and of the giver, in different ways. Thus his receiving takes the form of a mimicking, and the path of the gift is circular, involving the playful reversal of roles.             Finally, the “fulfilment” of the gift in the recipient’s receiving is not finally achievable in some single act or terminable series of acts. Since every receiving is only possible as an agreement to a vision of union of both giver and recipient to the gift, and is thus only effected by the mirroring back of the giver’s belonging to the gift (receiving the gift as belonging to self is inseparable from mirroring back the giver as belonging to the gift, since as we saw, only the authority of one who belongs to the gift can be heard by the recipient, thus effecting his own union with the gift) there can be no final destination of the gift, nor terminable series of gift-acts. If factually a series of givings stops, this is not by virtue of an ending arising from the gift itself. The playful restlessness of the gift that belongs to and rests in both and is only given and received by being freely mediated in its clear belonging to both—the reciprocal dynamic proper to gift is the source of eternity and the (atopic) “location” of infinity, if eternity and infinity happen at all.   Response to Derrida’s claim that the appearance of the giver as giver is not in accordance with the gift.   How might the giver show himself as giver to the recipient without detracting from his showing the recipient as belonging (to the gift, to life, to being)? We have already shown that such showing is essential to the gift’s movement since the recipient must receive the gift as performed according to another’s gift-authorised vision and exemplification of belonging-to-gift. A particular giver might remain anonymous for the sake of the gift, yet he does so not so as to distract others from the general figure of the giver, but to not draw attention to his particular self as giver. Thus he still wants (or should want) to give the figure of the giver but wants that figure to go forward purified of himself. This is not incompatible with giving, but neither is it essential to it. It is probable that that the concrete self-showing of the giver is essential to the most perfect affirmation of the recipient inasmuch as the true and the good as universals are most present in the beautiful, that is, in concreto. This is proven by the following: when the recipient finds out who his anonymous giver was his sense of the gift and his own giftedness do not decrease but increase, as long as the giver was not selfish or calculating about his giving and appears that way when his identity is finally uncovered. What we pursue here is the idea of a self-showing that is purified of all self-reference that is against the nature of gift.             What is the difference between a manifestation of giving that indeed appears but only as giving the recipient as beloved/belonging (figuring only as figur-ing (transitive)), and a giving that shows itself so much as giving that the recipient is not so much given himself and affirmed for his own sake as belonging, as made to witness the giver affirming himself? (The other extreme, which is no less false to the gift, is a giving in which the giver denies his own belonging. This weighs the recipient down). In this case (before the parantheses) the recipient is reduced to a subject that does not appear in the giver’s giving (as affirmed ‘object’), he thus becomes or remains estranged from himself (self-as-subject does not become also self-as-object). He is not shown that life belongs to him no less than to the appearing giver, and is thus unable to receive life and step up into a light in which he appears as beautiful, as good, as true, as belonging. All that is made clear to him is the giver as belonging—and even this must be distorted inasmuch as light, life and belonging are given out here as belonging only to giver (this is false to belonging, [two is impossible, three is possible]). Thus the showing of the giver as belonging lands in the recipient without affirming the recipient as belonging. In short, showing of ‘goodness’ is performed without the bestowal of goodness, and manifestation eventuates without playful repetition, without the entrance of the recipient into the very light that would show both as good (if there was true giving). The recipient is left existentially on the outside of what comes to him as subject; it is not granted to him to appear in the manner of that which appears to him. Thus subject and object are polarised, and appearance/beauty is separated from truth which transforms the recipient into what is seen (Gadamer, von Balthasar). But what is seen without transforming strikes the subject on her surface, reducing her to pure passivity, pure subject in relation to the bombarding of what appears without calling. [relation this to dualism/violence outside the movement of spirit in “spirit and movement”].             The appearance of the giver should not be conflated with the posing of the giver as giver. It is not necessary to deny, as Derrida and Marion do, that a giver can appear as giver to the recipient (and even to himself) without for that reason denying the recipient of any genuine gift or affirmation. Indeed such a denial bears disastrous and strange philosophical results. With attention to how things appear it is clear enough that the givenness of the giver as giver is not always the same as a self-showing of oneself as giver. (Lack of discretion in this area is linked with the anti-phenomenology of Derrida, for whom nothing is given as present but always deferred by way of the sign, which permits him to impose all sorts of deconstructive constructions over the phenomena. In the case of Marion, it is linked with the failure to distinguish between self-presentation that is intended and the givenness-of-self that is not intended and simply flows from the natural phenomenality of things and oneself. His phenomenology of gift/givenness conflates this difference). Moreover, intentional self-showing (to self and other) as giver is not in itself selfish or a denial of the other, and is compatible with genuine gift-giving. For when we are gifted to see a giver in generous action or gesture—even just as a warm smile—either as the second person or as a third person (both are gifted by the seen giving, but in different ways; Marion fails to explore this difference too) we are given ourselves as belonging, as good, as gift that calls for gift, as calling for affirmation-as-infusion-of-life.             At the same time, included in this affirmation, what is affirmed as belonging to us and given us—life, light, love, the good—is shown and given as transcending us. [Ref to joy in Hanby, Good in Desmond, being in Davies. Have to respond to Levinas’ opposition to medium, as well as Desmond’s critique of the “dialectical”]. Only in this way could the affirmation/gift bring us out of ourselves, call {Chretien}us into being, into a life that is independent of us even as it involves us generously thus giving us ourselves as bearers of what is true and good in itself: the life of belonging. What is wonder but the being-taken-aback at being taken-up into what precedes and exceeds us and what is true and good in itself but which nevertheless comes to us, chooses us? “Who am I that the mother of my lord should come to me?” A giving that does not entrust me with what transcends me only isolates me, closing my upon myself. The individualism that is rampant in Derrida for all his deconstruction of subjectivity shows itself when he claims that the recipient can only benefit from the gift as long as it does not appear as gift—supposedly such an appearance would bind her oppressively to something before and beyond him, make her in debt and not autonomous. But bringing the subject out of himself would only be a problem if the giver’s giving did not mediate a true vision of what belongs together: recipient and life/gift {from here meditate on Heidegger and language}. Calling the recipient beyond himself is only oppressive if it summons him to something or someone that does not give life and affirm belonging. However, if the giver’s giving is a true calling of the recipient—a calling which arises from being or spirit, following the ‘logic’ of what belongs together according to life’s goodness—then the recipient is not oppressed by the voluntaristic act of the giver (and giving can only be a voluntaristic imposition of will if it does not flow from being poetically, and on the other hand it is made impotent if enacted in reaction to the will to power) but is rather generated anew, according to his true element. What modern individualism cannot bear is that there really is one universal element in which we live, thrive and belong. Even less can it bear a voice that says with authority that this is where you belong, this is the way or “where” in which you can be. As if that authority knew better than me what was best for me!, the individualist objects, resentfully. (To open a space and propose it as the space in which the other can be, is not to give details about the other’s calling, though, and nor is it necessarily to impose that space upon the other). If Derrida rejects as unjust or oppressive any act that would affect or re-generate the other, since every one has the right to determine him/herself, he betrays his commitment to a monadic subject and liberal individualism. To repeat, binding the other in a determining field—by showing that he is gifted and dependent on what comes before him—is only oppressive if it does not flow from being poetically, or if the giver is not humbly open to new life (he shows he is by delighting in the other as gift), or if being is not inherently good. In the latter case even being “true” to being does not prevent one from mediating a force of being that is not life-giving but oppressive and destructive. But such an ontology of strife, in which being, goodness and truth are separated, is not a necessary position. An alternative narrative is an ontology of peace that re-unites the transcendentals, and critiques all false, violent and ugly acts of poiesis as tapping not into being per se, but being as distorted by creation’s fallen condition. Thus the doctrine of original sin accounts for how the transcendentals were/are severed, and affirms that being is not destructive as the ancients and postmoderns would have it (for Augustine, evil is only a privation of being). Individualism arises as a protective mechanism against what is seen as the pure neutrality or will to power in being. Positivistic authoritarian force (Ockham) is linked with such a separation of power/being and truth/goodness. The modern individual arises in reaction to such authoritarian subjection. If being is strife, or a precarious tension between strife and harmony, then there is no way to ensure that poiesis and authority give life and call others lovingly and wholesomely into a life of belonging rather than oppressing. Thus no poetic act can be trusted, and individuals must be given the right to determine themselves, and given a means to protect themselves from violent intrusions—if that is what they want (to deny individuals the right to be ‘violated’ as they choose is itself a violence). {note ambiguity in Heidegger, beautiful poiesis yet chaos at origin]. As recipient one is shown what transcends one and is called into transcendence. This only occurs by virtue of the giver’s showing what such a life-in-transcendence is. The giver appears as bearing the good-in-itself—generosity in the life of belonging—and shows in person what the recipient is called to. The recipient is called into life by seeing the giver living that life. Giving and showing/exemplifying are inseparable. Such exemplifying can be, but need not be, consciously intended. [different to intending the action that also happens to be exemplary, or even intending to show that action.] To appear as exemplar (and therefore to call and to give) it is no necessary to present oneself as exemplar intentionally. [but might appearance be greatest when intentionally presented?] On what conditions does such intentional exemplification avoid the oppressive posing of which we spoke? If the exemplar thinks and show himself as the greatest possible embodiment of what is good [he lets all know that he alone appears before himself as good], he lacks humility and insofar as lacks that he cannot affirm or delight in the other; he lords above her. The truly humble and fitting form of exemplification is one that encourages and affirms others as able (through grace/gift) to embody the good no less. This is compatible with knowing oneself as actually embodying the good more than others (as Jesus must have known)—as long as this is not the cause of discouragement or despair or isolation in others; as long as others are seen creatively—not “empirically”, but neither arbitrarily—as what they are called to be, embodiments of the good. Yet even Jesus in his humility must have known that no-one is called to embody the good as perfectly as he. So what prevents him from “looking down” on others? Why does he not despise all creatures, who cannot embody goodness as much as he? To despise is to deny that the other (person or thing or abstract object eg., country music) presents to one or to anyone what is good. The despised object is shunned because it is judged to be lacking in the radiance of the good (it may be banal, bland, or have the radiance of the evil or ugly). Between the despiser and the despised there is denied any dependence for knowing the good; the despised is not given as gift embodying and mediating the good. Of course, what is really good can be despised unfairly, either by prejudice, false generalisation based on certain impressions, or by having a distorted sense of what is good. Now the divinity of Christ does not entail his despising all creatures inasmuch as they are necessarily less perfect embodiments of the good, even before we consider sin. All that is required for Christ to delight in creatures is that they embody the good. To be sure, more perfect embodiments of goodness/God would mean more delight and affinity. Still, whatever is good, whatever radiates the goodness of being—the mystery of belonging, the joyful play of life—indeed gives the good to Christ as gifts, as holy offerings to the God-man. Christ’s openness to the good—to the divine life—or his capacity to continually receive life as gift, means that he takes intense delight in even the smallest things. True interest and wonder is a function of one’s receptivity to the good from without as it appears in/as things manifoldly. Receptivity to the good is only possible for him whose life in the good continually arrives as gift and event, thus stretching his existence out in eros and epektasis, keeping him young who is always born anew. In short, since the divinity of the divine persons is a holy eros, an eternally new receptivity to the divine life of the good—that is, since divine personal existence is continually received and re-given, renewed and reborn—divine personhood as the perfect embodiment of goodness does not entail the despising of everything lesser or even indifference. Their love of the life they give and receive makes the divine persons, who are nothing more than love, perfectly receptive to even the slightest embodiment of the good, their life. This eros draws them down to unite with what is the smallest, to highlight the marginalised, to side with the outcast, to have mercy on the sinner. To take flesh and die and sinner’s death. What does create an air of superiority, aloofness, cynicism—and even resentment—is the shift of one’s hope and attention from the other [a position, not an individual] who embodies the good and renews one’s life, toward one’s image of self or of one’s exclusive community. Instead of hope and wonder, which is turned outwards to seek and receive the good (without “appropriating” the good, which would deny the good’s arrival as embodied without), one is turned toward something else or to some other region, or perhaps constricted to a region within the total horizon of what is good. Or one can become jaded and no longer willing or able to receive the good as new life. Or one can delight corruptly in others’ failures. With what relish do we latch onto an unacceptable behaviour or turn of phrase (like the Mufti’s) and home in on his “evil”, tearing away like a pack of dogs at his moral corruptness in sanctimonious frenzy! (And what delight I have in showing such a corrupt attitude for what it is!)             What we learn from all this is that the condition of the giver’s appearing as giver without detracting from the goodness of the recipient is that such presentation present the recipient as he appears in the giver’s eyes in the following way—as good, as the giver’s delight, as one who brings the good to the giver (hence all giving is responsive to a prior gift). To be given a gift is to learn of oneself as gift for the other. Therefore, paradoxically-and contrary to Derrida and Marion—the condition of truly affirming another is showing him that he brings me life and delight (or at least, brings this to others, or is destined to). To affirm and give the gift is to affirm that the good belongs with the other as with an embodiment which brings the good to us, bringing us to life [same as putting-forth of art]. Thus he is shown and made as one who reveals me as one who brings the good to me and others; for the good to belong to him is for him to show me (and others) that the good belongs to me (us) insofar as I am called to show others that it belongs to them…. [diappropriate].             In sum, if the giver appears as delighting in him to whom he gives, he affirms the recipient wholly and does not detract from the recipient’s goodness. Moreover, the recipient cannot genuinely receive the gift and take up the call to embody and repeat the good unless he learns of himself through the other’s loving gaze as the one whom the giver takes delight, one who is, in a sense, the “final cause” of the giving. The recipient cannot receive the gift as “for him” unless he knows that a loving vision of him inspired it. Receiving the gift genuinely is one with a certain intimacy with the giver, the one who holds the recipient dearly in his eyes—to receive truly is to let the gaze enfold one—even crush one (the Carmelite mystics, Gibran on love). It is to dare to answer and enter the place where one is naked before the other.             A “false” giving, whether or not it appears as giving, does not give a loving gaze (which as we saw, requires epekstatic receptivity to the good). It gives to one without seeing one as good. It is “good” without answering to good. Goodness lands not on goodness, but emits itself into the void (anti-spirit). Thus the self-affirmation of goodness at work between the giver and recipient, is the condition of genuine affirmation, genuine selflessness, genuine difference. The self-return of the good as ground of difference. Seeing and responding to the other as good opens the space of genuine difference.               [respect-worthy (calling-for-charity = demands good) is inseparable from delightful (calling one’s eros by displaying good).]         29th Jan.   The paradox is that Jesus (or whoever truly loves) shows us his goodness just by showing us our goodness in his eyes. In gazing into his eyes we are given ourselves as he sees us. Think about your mother’s or father’s smile. Or your sister’s. You see her (him) smiling, but that smile is showing you that she sees you as good, beautiful, lovable. At the same time she shows you that you are good and that she is good. It takes a good soul to show someone that they are good. A mother’s showing of her goodness, and her showing of her children’s goodness in her eyes, are inseparable. By smiling one says, you are good! But it also happens that by affirming someone else as good, you show yourself as good too. The truth of the smile is “we are good.”             To be shown that you are good is to be given more life. To have a sense that one is precious, beloved, good means to be energised, able to give. So when someone sees and affirms me as good, and I accept it, I am renewed in my sense of self, given my self again by the other’s loving gaze and affirmation, empowered to be and to love.             Now if I were to forget that my sense of self as loved—which is the source of my life and energy—was/is given to me by others, then in a sense I would be stealing. I have to acknowledge where my life (my sense of self as loved which makes me able to celebrate) comes from. If I do not I falsely claim (to others and myself) that my life, my elation, my ability to be and give, comes from me, that I am its source. But the truth is that my power to give is a gift given by those who saw me or see me and show me myself as good. Before any other human, it was my mother and father that granted this to me.             So my ability to give—my goodness—is given to me before I give. My giving always comes after receiving. I am not the primary giver, but always come after a prior giving. If you ask then, who was the first to give? the answer has to be God, the Father. He gave and gives before anyone else. He sees that we are good even before we exist. Deep in us the Father is constantly whispering that we are good in his eyes. In that way he sustains us. Our goodness, our beauty, our preciousness, our giving—all this depends on Him seeing and affirming us first as good.             We can only enter into the truth of our being by admitting that everything we have is from God. But even the grateful act of praising God for what he gives is a gift. Whenever I answer God’s giving with the gift of my praise and thanks, I find that he is giving me more (praise and thanksgiving is already God’s work and gift). It is impossible to equal God’s giving with my own, because even my response to him is a gift. I will never be able to be completely true or “equal” to myself—which would require thanking God for everything that I have and am—because to thank is to receive more things to be thankful for.             Does that mean that I should stop thanking? No. It means that eternal life opens up for me when, in my praise and thanksgiving, I receive more life for which to be grateful. Giving to God as a response to God’s giving has to be eternally repeated. The more I thank God, the more I am given. A chain reaction.       Beauty. Seeing the other as beautiful as a place where life dwells, lingers, and can be entered, where life can enfold one to console and heal, refresh and delight.   (Comment on this)
Monday, March 5th, 2007
3:42 pm	Movement as Spirit. 5 March 2007. 2600 words. Movement as Spirit   Dynamism means movement. Movement requires that which moves and a distance across which it moves. That distance need not precede the movement; it might be generated by the movement of what moves. Distance entails two or more sites at which that which moves takes place. In movement, that which moves dwells in or at one site and then another. The dwelling of what moves is not purely static; that would mean the lack of movement in, out or through that site. On the other hand the dwelling of what moves is not purely “on the go”; that would mean that that which moves does not dwell anywhere, and it never being the case that it is in a place, it would not truly move. For movement is the movement from one being-in-place to another, a dynamism that sublates (and so includes) the difference between being-at-one-place and being-at-another-place. Without this sublation or unity-in-difference, there would only be being-at-one-place and being-at-another-place, but not being-in-one-place in the mode of being-toward-another-place. Being in one place would be being in that place, and that is all. Yet such stasis is meaningless and impossible, for how could something be there in a place if its being-there involved no life or dynamism? Pure rest—not the living rest from which all work arises, but the absence of life and power—is death or non-being, and that which does not live cannot dwell, cannot be present, cannot be in. Being in one place strictly, means not even to be in that place. To be in one place one has to be on the way to another place. And yet to be on the way to another place one has to be really in a place as opposed to another, although this “as opposed to” must be taken as a different way of being “in” that other place—by coming from or going toward it, or both. Being nowhere, being no closer to one place than any other, being devoid of local dwelling, represents the inability to move to another place. Dwelling and movement are therefore each other’s condition.             Movement is the ordered unity between dwelling here and dwelling there. That which moves is in this place and then in that place; being in that place follows on from being in this place. Movement requires order or direction: that which moved came from here and ended up there. Such ordering must preserve difference while holding the two places together as one. If that which moves cannot arrive in the mode of having been elsewhere—if the fact of being in the first place does not stay with that which moves so that when it arrives it arrives from elsewhere—then there cannot really be movement. The only possibility remaining would be the extraneous temporal ordering of states-of-affairs (being-here, being-there) imposed from without, rather than time or order arising dynamically from and staying within things themselves, as their history. The possibility of movement, then, is tied to the peculiar manner in which that which moves dwells in place: even as it moves to another place, its being in the first place still holds but in a different way, as past, as memory, as history, which must be seen as constituting that which moves. So while on one hand what moves can only move by leaving one place for another, it can only leave a place and so move by remaining there in another sense. Therefore the dwelling in place of what moves is at the same time an unbreakable tie and a tie that is broken, one that indeed must be broken. One might even say that the unbreakable tie that a thing has with a place is lived out by wounding its tie with that place and healing it again. Only what is deeply tied to a place can be separated from that place, and only what separates from and reunites with a place can meaningfully be said to dwell there. Movement is a separation. To separate from does not mean to destroy all memories of and ties to where one was; it does not mean to redefine oneself from scratch, to repress or disown one’s past. To separate from means to move beyond where one is rooted in spirit or memory, and feel the loss or rupture of being away from where one belongs—perhaps in order to belong somewhere else, too. If even this ongoing tie was broken, and no memory was retained of where one dwelt, then no brokenness would be felt, no being outside oneself, and no movement would take place. For movement is a separating whose brokenness entails a remaining where one is coming from. Properly speaking, he who belongs nowhere does not really move. Nor does she without memory belong in place or move in or out of places. Only what separates from one place can arrive elsewhere. To really be in a place is to be tied to that place always, and yet to be called to separate from there (possibly to return). A place that is forgettable for one is not really inhabited by one. To leave such a place entails no separation, no internal rupture, no leaving-behind of self. But leaving self behind where one dwells/dwelt is the condition of moving forward—and of being anywhere to begin with.             To move is to go from one place to another, to be in one place then another, to dwell here and then there. Both of these beings-in must involve the formation or strengthening of a bond to place, a bond that admits of the possibility of separation in the above sense, as well as the call to such separation (since what insists on staying statically becomes alienated from where it is). But what ties something to a place? What moves is tied to those places in which it is released into its being. One belongs where one is allowed to be oneself. Place and site as such attract and bind, for place and site are where a being is allowed to be itself, the space in which it comes into its act/actuality.   What if the movement of a being from one place to another were not the same as its act? Then that being could not move itself from one place to another in its striving to be. The only “dwelling” that such a being could have in a place would be its remaining there statically; it would not receive itself in act there by giving itself to another site. Its being or actuality would be a stasis. Such an inert thing could not belong anyway, and if it moved it could only be moved arbitrarily and by external force. Nothing about it would make it belong more in one place than another.             Spirit, on the other hand (and gift, life, love and light) is in act insofar as it moves from one place to another. Its power and impulse to move is internal to it, and yet this is only turned into act (or allowed to turn itself into act) by the mediation of its places or sites. At these sites, spirit comes into act by being given from there, by being allowed to give itself and move to another site.             What are these sites? Primarily: spiritual existents, or, the inspired. That is, persons. Spirit dwells in the person as a power to give itself, and comes into act with the person’s consent to the giving of spirit. Such giving entails (and even generates) a recipient into which giving/given spirit moves, and from which it repeats its act of giving. The person is the site of spirit inasmuch as he is the one from whom spirit is breathed forth. The breathing forth of spirit is the act or being of spirit, an act that is essentially self-repeating, for its being is its movement to another place/person in whom it can be by going forth again, ad infinitum. Remembering what we said above, the breathing out of spirit involves the tie of spirit with him from whom it is breathed forth. What is breathed forth keeps its tie with its origin, and so comes out with a certain rupturing. Thus the second inspired is able to breathe life back into the first as a gift that heals, as it were, a gift that belongs there and is now reunited there. Therefore the second is able to enact spirit again by returning it, an ability which is the anticipated condition of the first enactment of spirit.             The act of spirit has/is a form that can be repeated by many, otherwise spirit could not repeat itself and therefore could not give itself, which is to say it could not enact itself as spirit. The enactor of spirit, the person, is taken up into an act or form that is universal and thus is communicable and true, radiant and repeatable, and therefore given to the recipient who can engage in the same act or form, differently. Spirit in act is the pure form of giving, which transcends the particularities of who is giving and who is receiving. The triune structure of giver-gift-recipient is generated from the pure and universal form of spirit, bestowing on its participants the roles that are proper to spirit, now in one conformation, now in another, by the necessary and constant inversion of spirit’s direction. Who gives gives over the role of giver; who receives receives this role and simultaneously gives over the role of receiver, only to receive it back again. These roles are positions that arise from the necessity of spirit as it moves back and forth of its own accord. Persons enter into each other by adopting the spiritual positions (giver, receiver) of each other, taking turns, thus allowing the entire dynamism of spirit to live itself out through them now in this way, now in another.             Spirit gives itself out of itself. Spirit has two moments, spirit-as-breaking-out and spirit as what is broken out of, or in other words: spirit as gift and spirit as giver, respectively. The incommunicable person is spirit in the latter sense. The person’s bearing of spirit is not a holding and giving of some principle separate from himself, but is rather an identity with spirit that admits of other identities with spirit. The person is spirit as incommunicable—that moment of spirit from which spirit as communicable goes forth as repeatable gift.             Inasmuch as only spirit moves itself and is givable, communicable or repeatable, spirit is the motor and element of all movement. Only that which dwells in many places by separating itself from and reuniting itself with each place, can move. Moreover, it is only by virtue of that which, as pure form or universal, is sovereignly self-mediating rather than ordered to the self-unity of another, that anything can belong. As the atopic principle and ground of everything’s belonging, spirit gathers places/persons in unity-in-difference, which again, is the condition of movement, or rather the way in which movement has to occur. Spirit does not give itself, cannot be given—cannot enact itself as giver and gift by differentiating itself into these moments—without the affirmation of the recipient as one to whom spirit is destined, as one who is called to live or bear spirit. To give spirit as gift one must show and affirm the recipient as one to whom spirit belongs, one in whom spirit can dwell by enacting itself. That is, spirit-as-giver must call the recipient into being as spirit-as-recipient destined to re-enact spirit-as-giver. This he does by showing his own identity with spirit, the pure form of giving, thus showing the recipient the life into which he is called. To give spirit is to show oneself as giver of spirit, and in showing oneself thus, to show the recipient as giver of spirit. To give spirit is to show that spirit as giving belongs to both since it is enacted by both, and can only enact itself fully by both in synergy. The recipient cannot receive gift/spirit into himself and as himself, if he is not shown what he is, what he is called to be—what spirit demands of him in its vital self-generation, a coming-to-be that is supremely good, weighty and authoritative. The giving of spirit is therefore the event of truth and beauty. Goodness—the giving of gift and the affirmation of the other that is essential to such giving—is thus inseparable from radiance. Gift passes as beauty, beauty passes as gift. What is beautiful is what calls one generously into the same belonging to spirit that is embodied in the beautiful. What is generous and affirming is what shows itself as beautiful, thus exemplifying and giving the life to which one is called, the life which is given for one. It is in the beautiful that the bodily and the sensual is taken up into the life of spirit, the graceful movement of reciprocal belonging.             Spirit passes as light and is received as truth. Only what passes as light and is received as truth can be given in accordance with freedom. In contradistinction, what passes into one by bypassing the contemplative gaze is against freedom and is therefore oppressive and against the personhood of the person. What is sensually or intellectually or even mystically given outside the parameters of spirit which calls one into belonging by showing self and other as belonging, is destructive.             Outside the movement of spirit, in which there is no violence but only affirmation or the grace of call and response, movement is a graceless striking against, an acting over-against, a force that does not infuse beautifully and lovingly but rather exerts itself violently, reducing the patient to a passive subject and object. Such movement does not affirm and generate the recipient by passing into her, but instead presumes a pre-given patient upon which to work. Dynamism and what is dynamised are divided. Spirit, however, gives itself by generating the recipient as the same as what is given, that is, spirit. Spirit takes its place and enacts itself in itself. Pure efficient force, on the other hand, arrogates to itself a medium that is not internal to itself. It is therefore enacted outside itself, and in having to supplement itself with something dualistically other to itself, shows itself as fatally incomplete, far from good, and in a sense, impossible. That is not to say that is does not have some sort of drive to continue enacting itself. Its very incompleteness, tied with its desire to achieve the completeness that is impossible for it (for this is only possible for spirit, which its own medium), means it has a feverish grip on itself, taking things into itself like a blackhole in its mad need to become what it cannot become. Force outside spirit tragically apes spirit, attempts to reproduce in itself and out of itself the self-sufficiency of spirit, destroying everything in the process, just as Satan destroys in parodying God, who alone has life in himself.             The sort of movement that takes something opposed to it as its medium presumes and feeds on pure movement: the dynamism of spirit which takes itself as medium. For what could move out of itself and take a medium other to itself—as opposed to generating its medium within itself as a moment of itself, as recipient is generated by spirit and in spirit as a bearer of spirit called to give spirit—without having a movement that precedes its moving in that medium? Pure force is spirit escaping the bounds of spirit and becoming anti-spirit, not being content with its original medium and horizon. Anti-spirit feeds itself on what it divides from spirit, thus denying the sovereignty of spirit. But all the time it must draw on spirit to move. To fall is to mix spirit with what is artificially outside spirit, to force God into a place that denies his sovereignty as subsistent life.             Spirit, gift, beauty, truth: these are the names of movement as such.                   5 March. 2600. Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: bohemian rhapsody (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 17th, 2006
5:14 pm	The Ethics of Appearance   The artist who takes up stage in order to receive an award traditionally uses the occasion to acknowledge the contributions of others. It would be an unjust omission to receive praise without acknowledging those who made the production of one’s work possible. Recipients of awards typically thank their partners for their general support, patience and belief in the artist’s vision, as well as those who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make the production (of say, a film) possible. Those previous or contemporary artists who inspired the work are also mentioned.             There is something ethically significant about the act of sharing praise and acknowledgement. In at least most cases (or arguably, all cases), the one receiving the light of acknowledgement has a duty to gratefully point out other contributions. While one takes the stage alone in person to receive the award, it is fitting that this stage-appearance is given to all others involved in the work even if this is just by a verbal mention. To invite others physically onto the stage so that they can receive their dues is also fitting, and even preferable. A director might invite his/her producer on stage, for instance, when receiving his/her award. To receive a reward only while acknowledging others – so as to recognise that the reward belongs to some extent to others, if not equally to them – is ethically necessary in most cases. To take stage and praise exclusively is a certain act of theft. A producer who was not acknowledged by the director receiving his Logie would justly feel outraged. Something important due to him would have been refused him. There is something outrageous about one person taking dues for another’s work, or taking all credit for something that was a joint effort. Justice requires everyone to be given what belongs to him/her, and this includes acknowledgement, credit, praise, gratitude – or in short, light. The producer who is not given the credit that is his due is kept in obscurity when he deserves at least some mention, especially if it is the time and space for giving credit. A just distribution of light also requires that those who contributed nothing receive no light, and that those who contributed little receive little light. Justice requires light in proportion to the self-donation of those contributing to some good. There is injustice as long as the light of praise or gratitude does not match the extent of someone’s self-donation for some good – either by deficiency or by excess, although deficiency is probably a worse fault (perhaps excess light given to one is only unjust to the extent that it detracts from the light that should be accorded to others). The Christian expectation of final judgement is the hope (and trembling fear) of the eschaton, the coming-to-light of all that is worthy of light, to the extent that it deserves light. There is the promise of greater or lesser glory for those who commit themselves to serving God, whether explicitly (for the sake of the Gospel), or just in their day-to-day decency to their neighbour (“I was hungry and you fed me, a prisoner and you visited me…”). God’s judgement is the elevation into glory (light, claritas, the “stage”) of those who have given themselves over for the good, in accordance with both the type and degree of their righteousness and love – and the damnation into obscurity of those who refused to contribute to the work of the good. Justice is given by God as a proportionate distribution of His light. On that day, only those works that can stand the test of justice will remain standing, in the light. Evil works that were committed in secret will not remain in secret or protected from judgement, but will be brought into the open just so that they will be condemned, with those who committed them cast into shame and obscurity. It is worth asking, what sort of light is the light of condemnation and shame? The horror of the damned is their appearance as antithetical to the good. Their appearance is ugly. What they have become is made clear, even marked on their bodies (consider the contorted bodies of the damned painted in the Sistine Chapel). While the glorified have a beautiful radiance matching their lives’ unity with the good, the damned have an ugly countenance in accordance with their rejection of the good, and so prefer obscurity (“those whose deeds are evil prefer the darkness and hate the light, so that their works might not come to light”). God and the blessed would prefer not to consider them, and so they are cast out from the realm of beatifying light. Yet we are all to be rewarded with the appearance of what we truly are. For the blessed this is a blessing, for the damned this is a torture. The beauty of a Dickens novel or a Shakespeare play is its genius in allowing light to judge character. Evil characters are shown up clearly for what they are. Dickens and Shakespeare do not condemn them so much as let them take the stage as they are. It is the light flooding the stage that judges them. But in this day and age neither good nor evil characters can really appear in novels, insofar as we have rejected the idea of the light. We prefer obscurity, and choose relativity to dispel the light indefinitely. Above I spoke about the justice of giving light were light is due. This must now be understood as light that credits or praises someone or their act as good. It would be no good for the committed producer if the director took the stage and went on about how bad his producer was. In some ways this is worse than not mentioning the producer at all (although some might prefer to have some mention rather than none at all; at least that way their existence is acknowledged). The judging light at work in the Gospels and the Revelations to John, in Dante’s Comedy, Michelangelo’s Judgement Scene, as well as the texts of Dickens and Shakespeare, is a light that merely releases things into truth (and some things’ truth is just their “falseness”), bearing their natures into manifestness. What is really good is allowed to show itself as good, to the degree that it is good, and in the way that it is good, while what is not good is let appear as not good, to the degree that it is not good, and in the way that it is not good. Of course, this light is only effective relative to one who is receptive to that light, able to be attuned to the judgement of things that it makes. Moreover, light is only effective because things have an innate propensity to be lit up, to be afforded their appearance. Light works only because being rises to the surface like desire, prompting our attention. Light shone upon something is out of place to the extent that there is nothing of substance there to be lit up. This is what so many contemporary artists cannot accept – that attention and light has a formal object that is connatural to it, and that not just anything can burst into manifestness with the same radiance. A minimalist collage of circles simply cannot hold the attention as well as, say, a painting of the face. We are not necessarily uncultured, ignorant or unjust if we simply pass over an artwork that consists just of a rotating paper-clip. Good art has an innate capacity to hold the attention – relative, of course, to zeitgeist – and need not be focussed upon by sheer volitional effort in the name of some egalitarian ideal or pretense of broadmindedness. Often, but not always, we can rightly question the health or sincerity of artists who are fascinated by some figure that has little substance. True, often it takes a genius to see something where most can divine no significance. But there is a difference between genius and madness (not to mention the unskilled artist taking advantage of the egalitarian environment). Misdirected light – the calling of the attention to a place where nothing can hold it – when made into a philosophy, is attentional voluntarism. There is nothing that warrants attention more than any other; everything differently but equally calls for thought. The decorated paperclip belongs next to the Mona Lisa, and without ridicule. The fear of forgetting something that deserves attention, and the resentment of being repressed, has opened the floodgates to the undiscerning reception of everything. Easier to accept everything than use discernment, which moreover requires the spine to withstand bullying accusations of narrow-mindedness. Everything is now free to slosh about around us, and whoever objects is a redneck. What then, makes something deserving of light? We can only answer this by attending to specific examples. It is overwhelming to consider the number of mothers who, day in, day out, attend to their children’s and husband’s needs without expecting recognition. If there is anyone who deserves praise, it is the mother who in self-effacing suffering and service bears others into being. When one is more mature, it comes as a humbling shock to realise how much one’s parents have given up just so that one can have life, and a better life – and often, all this without announcing their generosity. The hours that my father has put in at arduous, monotonous jobs just so that we could be fed! This suggests that more light is deserving where more time, effort and pain has been offered for the birth of something good in itself. It is surely fitting to praise someone who organises a gathering in order that people be recognised for their efforts. The work of bringing the deserving into light is itself worthy of light. Light is reflexive, highlighting everything that brings things to light as they deserve. The mother brings her children into light by her obscure service, and as such is surely worthy of light. As Heidegger knew, giving recedes so that what it gives might appear. But in each case, the generosity that itself recedes is worthy of light. Of course, generosity that works only so as to receive light itself is not generosity. To give is to give the recipient light by withdrawing oneself. The giver makes himself into a ground in order that the recipient can figure. It appears that whoever gives up light in order to bring something good to light, is herself worthy of light. One deserves light to the extent that one has given light up for the sake of the good. What makes these things (potentially) good, worthy of being brought to light? Their capacity to bring others to light. There is certainly a circularity here. But this must follow from the immanent telos of light or the good. Ultimately, light lights up nothing but the event of lighting up. Light celebrates and shows itself by celebrating and showing those which are lit up and celebrated for their power to light things up. What does the good ultimately celebrate? Itself. What is the object of celebration? Celebration itself. What does joy revel in? Its joy. But what could be so good that it simply enjoys its own being? Life. Whatever can bear the circularity of light is fit to bear the light. Light can only highlight something if at the same time it can show itself there as light. Wherever light as such is not manifest, the being is not manifest. A being’s manifestness is borne upon the self-manifestation of the light which it mediates. In this light we should reconsider why contribution and generosity deserve light. Light is essentially its own self-giving. It occurs only as emanation. It only dwells where it is given forth. It endures no stagnation, possession or static location. Light and giving are therefore virtually synonymous. To have light is to give light. To give at all is to give the other light, to show her as good. In each moment of generosity light is given forth for the other’s sake, and this giving of light makes the giver able to appear, even as her giving was for the sake of the other’s appearance. To give is to be something in which light as such can manifest itself. Light cannot manifest itself in the one who refuses to give light. The universal condition of appearing then, is the act of letting others appear. The other’s face shines insofar as it makes me shine in turn. The radiance of form is its mobility and repeatability, or in other words, its contagion. A being can only be present there insofar as its life circulates, thus producing more instances of the same. Radiance begets mimesis. A paper-clip has no radiance because it does not let appear. The face, however, is pure appearing-as-letting-appear. In contemplating the face, we are elevated into appearance, we are made to figure, we are celebrated, upheld in the light. Beauty beatifies. Moses came down the mountain with his face aglow. The one contemplating becomes the one contemplated and the one who lets others become manifest for contemplation. The truly contemplatible – that which calls for thought, attention, light – is that which, when seen, turns the seer into one seen. Whatever work can be attended to with a voyeur’s gaze, according to a dualism of subject and object [the idol?], cannot be beautiful. The beautiful is that which makes one beautiful. Whatever only shows itself as beautiful, and does not elevate others into appearance and beauty, is not really beautiful. The stagnation of light is incompatible with beauty. Beauty elevates, making beauty. It is by virtue of their expropriation of light that the producer and the mother are worthy of light. Both bore into the light something that could in turn give light (a film, a child). It is fitting that light be given to them because their acts were generous, of the same nature as light, indeed moments of light itself. Light dwells were it can manifest itself, and it can manifest itself wherever a being expropriates its light. Goodness and truth are then ultimately one. It is right to shed light on the moments of light’s giving, for no reason other than that it is good that there is light. Light must celebrate itself, and thus give light to every moment of itself in endless self-reflection.   Next: Light requires public. Christ-obscurity to glory.   B. Triffett 2400 words 17/8/06. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
8:17 pm	The Problem of the Unity of the Good   To speak of the Good is to hold that everything that is really good, ultimately derives its worth from one transcendent reality or hyper-reality. Aristotle took issue with this Platonic vision of unity, claiming instead that there are many ways in which things are said to be good, and that they cannot be related back to just one original sense or source of goodness. Here I ask under what aspect – dynamis? or actual diffusion? – is the One absolute goodness. On one hand it seems that we should say that it is in its diffusion – its kenosis, bestowal, procession or agere – that the Good is absolute goodness, inherently worthy of occurring. Where the dynamic form of giving takes place, there radiates a light and charm signifying this dynamism’s “necessity”: the truth that it is simply good that giving takes place. The dynamism of giving has power and attractive pull, calling us to engage it and mediate its self-bestowal. Giving as such is given to itself and to us as an activity that is absolutely good, worth doing for its own sake. Giving is thus performed with the grace of self-sufficiency. Although it is pure relationality, giving is immanent activity per excellence, being its own raison d’etre. Notwithstanding the resistances in ourselves that must be overcome, to give is the most natural thing one can do. Insofar as one’s existence positively resists or is simply lesser than the full grace of giving, giving is indeed unnatural to one. Yet giving is always natural in se, having no need to be ordered to anything else or to be enacted by external force. Whatever does not have its reason to be in itself must be called into being, ultimately by a Good which is its own reason (otherwise nothing would have reason, nothing would be good). But giving, as its own end, calls itself into being. Yet we must account for the fact that giving could not be absolutely good if giver and receiver were not also good. Distinct hypostases or bearers of the Good must themselves have a worthiness-to-be, otherwise its giving could not dwell in each and live between. But what if we were to say that the existent does not have its end in itself? It is not simply good, for example, that the person just exists. It is simply good that there is giving, and the person’s basic existence is good just insofar as she is a potential bearer of the Good, as giver and recipient. Basic existence is in each case just an instance of the power of the Good: its original impulse or dynamis, as opposed to its activity. So by asking in what sense dynamis rather than diffusion is good, we are asking what sense the person (the existent per excellence) is good as such. It would seem that persons are inherently precious because the Good is present in each case as dynamis, as an impulse and call to give and receive. So is the actual diffusion of the Good the primary sense of goodness, the reality from which all that is good derives its goodness, including the person as dynamis? Or is it misleading to make diffusion primary and dynamis secondary, as if the Good were less present in the latter? That is the question. Is the first act of the Good, its dwelling as dynamis, any less a reason for its own being, than the second act of the Good, its diffusion? The Good as dynamis does have its reason in itself – but it has not yet united with that reason as actuality. The immanent telos for dynamis is the act of diffusion. But second act is not a determination added to first act from without, or a higher reality to which it must be ordered. Second act is simply first act released from within into its own element, the self-performance that it wants to be. Hence the dynamis of the Good does contain its reason to be in itself, but it has yet to realise and manifest this secret of its goodness. Dynamis has its own reason – its act of diffusion – as its very own possibility. Not a possibility in relation to something else which can realise this for it – dynamis is active potential, not passive potential – but an immanent possibility. What is surprising is that dynamis has its telos, and is united with it, even before that telos takes the flesh of actuality. What is wondrous is the unfolding of the Good out of itself, the manifestation of immanent telos from a potential that had it before it existed. The immanent possibility of that which is completely good (self-giving) is our vitality. We feel it as a laugh that must be let out, the words that we must share, the love that we must release into activity. To exist is to be an internal possibility for the Good as realised – which is to say that to exist is to be always-already excited. So why am I precious? Because from deep within me the Good strives to come into being. The Good is given to me as an immanent possibility. And that is the only way that the Good can be borne. The Good cannot be performed except as an enactment of dynamis which bears in secret its immanent telos. I am a hidden spark from which the manifest Good wants to rise. And every hidden spark of the Good is beloved. But belovedness lies deep and in secret. It takes the grace of divine vision to acknowledge it. To see and to care for that spark in others and ourselves is the genius of the Good, which loves nothing but to call itself into being.     B Triffett. 970 words 9th April 2006.   Current Mood: calm Current Music: What Now Affects You, Beloved (Comment on this)
Friday, July 21st, 2006
4:10 pm	Summary of Project 21 July 2006.   1. Link between monism (required by monism) or the idea that beings are nothing other than Event, and that event as interminable. Terminated event or terminable event is not wondrous.   2. Interminability of event made possible by hierarchy (a reading of ontological difference, which also means secondary causation?).   Beauty/Wonder/Thinking requires: “Eventual Monism.”  Which requires: Epectasis Which requires: Difference, Secondary Causation, Heirarchy, “Innocence” (“Inoperative” a la Nancy).   Wonder > Eventual Monism > Epectasis > Causal Hierarchy.                         | (requires reconciliation of one and two).   Comparison of Gregory of Nyssa and Later Heidegger?   // other themes.   Impossibility of pure agape. Ontology and Metaphysics is compatible (response to Levinas). // 10 topoi: Receptivity/Secondary causation. Eternity, Unity, the Holy. Spirit and Gift. Event and Repetition. Love and Innocence. Current Music: Hey ya has 22 bars. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 26th, 2006
7:00 pm	... that is, the givenness of Doing to Knowing insofar as Doing calls for Knowing, and the givenness of Knowing to Doing insofar as Knowing calls for Doing, again. (Comment on this)
6:27 pm	The Father is the primary centre of activity, who withdraws since as first cause he is immanent to all, operative more than all co-operators. He is Love as the Kenosis of Nature. The Son is the secondary centre of activity, toward which Kenosis flows. The Son's kenosis (to what?) participates in the Father's, allowing the latter to take place in him. Then The Father stands as the givee so that the Son can participate in the Father's original giving. But this giving is different to the Father's, naming what is rather than giving what is. Past tense rather than future tense. The Father does not receive Giving as a received power to give, but as a naming of who he is. The Father gives the Son to the Son by giving His (the Father's) giving to the Son for his co-operation. But the Son gives the Father to the Father by giving the Father to the Father, by reflecting back what he is. The Father's giving is repetition of Self, the Son's giving is repetition of Other (the mediation of the Father's return to himself). The latter requires the former, but the former requires the latter to go deeper into itself. Relation between doing (Father) and knowing what is being done or has been done (Son). Somehow the latter allows the former to begin again, this time more perfectly. The Spirit mediates between doing and knowing. (Comment on this)
6:04 pm	addition to Love part 2 Nature does not so much give itself to the first giver, as be present as the impulse to give itself. The person is awake insofar his nature is to give, and that nature calls for its active expression. Awakenness is fullness. (Comment on this)
5:10 pm	Love Part 2 Love is its own agent; it does not derive its dynamism or nature from anything other than itself. It bestows agency so that it might be mediated and communicated, and it does so by its very nature. But the loving agency of the person is always the agency of Love. The agency of Love is not a co-operation between Love and the person. Love and the person do not make two agents when the person is loving. There is no love in act where there is no person in act, but the person in act, insofar as he is actually loving, just is Love in act. Love is its own agent, but it bestows on the person the power and call to bear that agency to fruition. Such bestowal is the generation of the person as such, even if that generation is spread over time so that a person already existing can grow in being as he receives the power to love with increasing depth. If it is true that one who grows in being by being graced by Love already exists, it is also true that this prior existence is the promise of greater loving power, the suggestion of more intense being, the sign of a greater love and greater being to come (which is but the same Love, only more perfectly given). The gift of Love and being has indeed been given, but only in the mode of a gift that both is and is yet to come. Present givenness is the presence of a perfect future in the present, but in the mode of its suggestive withdrawal from the present. Every lover must receive the power to Love. This is true in a sense even for the primary, divine Lover whose very nature is Love, since the notion of free or personal act requires a distinction between nature and act, the latter being the personal expression of the former. Loving act draws on a power that it cannot generate, but can only facilitate. Love as Nature – not “nature” as opposed to “spirit” or “grace” or “reason” or “culture” but as distinct from action – generates the possibility and necessity of act; its being as nature, as dynamic impulse, is just the generation of that possibility and necessity. This is not a mechanical or efficient necessity that would override freedom and make the active mediation of persons unnecessary, along with their existence. No, Love as Nature gives itself as an impulse and awakening just so that the one thus awakened might give his own act – an act which will be Love in act, and so must involve the free movement to coincide with Love – but this would be impossible if Love as Nature were not entrusted to one, awaiting one’s free response. This freedom is always called by and tied to the Nature that awakens it, even when one chooses to go against its essential orientation, turning it against itself. The freedom to Love, which must include the intimate givenness of Love as power and impulse, is the effect of Love as Nature, and nothing more than a mode of existence of Love, generated reflexively within itself, like a thought consubstantial with the mind that thinks it. Love as personal act involves the free identification of the person with Love, so that one stands as Love, in act. Now if every movement that affirms Love must be inspired by Love, and a movement of Love itself, then the identification of person with Love for the sake of having Love (oneself as nature) act in the form of loving person, must already be a movement of Love. Love must include within its dynamic essence the impulse to affirm itself, coincide with itself and mediate itself. Or better, as dynamism and life, Love just is an impulse to affirm itself; dynamism or life just is this impulse to affirm itself. To be is to desire the expression of one’s being, the impulse to act and so coincide with one’s nature actively. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 24th, 2006
4:53 pm	Love Part 1 Love is holiness. Whatever is holy, is endowed with its holiness by Love. Only as bearing the mark of Love – by being born in love, and then by loving – does the other show herself as holy, as radiant. Only as a child of Love does the other inspire wonder, bestow freshness, and call one to rise to the wholesome task of respect, care and praise. It is only through the movements of that same Love that such respect, care and praise can be given. Love is the dynamism of both the call and the response to itself. Only through the grace and medium of Love is one worthy to approach and be approached by the holy other. Only Love is worthy of Love. One is only ever mediately worthy of the other’s presence. Love is primarily worthy, while the bearer of Love, being different to Love even while ontologically intimate with Love, is only derivatively worthy. Since the other is born by Love, her very appearance is the givenness of Love, to which the only true response is Love. Between self and other, Love approaches and receives itself, here as lover, there as beloved.             If the other’s givenness is not to be violence or absurdity, its principle must be Love. The only approach that is true to one is Love’s approach. Only Love has that way of giving itself, arriving, touching and calling that is worthy of one’s person, for each person is a child born and presented in the bosom of Love. Existence is the child of Love, and therefore its manifestation. As borne in her existence upon Love, the person calls for a response that is fitting to whatever pertains to Love, her Father and Mother. But only Love is true to Love. The only worthy response to the person is the same Love that gives birth to that person. I am called to echo back to him the very Love that is his birth. With the revoicing of such Love I know the other, since I repeat his very creation, nurturance and letting-be. There is only Love. Love alone is necessary. Only Love really necessitates. Love must go on being Love; that is all that matters. The call to be true always emanates from Love, for only Love has its goodness, its reason for existence, in itself. Apart from Love, nothing could demand one to be true to it. Love alone claims fidelity and truth with real authority, and only Love can answer that call. Love alone is truth, since Love alone is true to the only thing to which one can be true: Love. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006
3:50 pm	reworked proposal Gratitude and Spirit The Interplay of Gift as the Birth of Unity-in-Difference Ever since I came upon Heidegger, the question that motivated me was: how are we to think the relation between being and beings, or what ontology do we need, to accommodate the attitude and truth of wonder? I began to see that wonder is an attunement to beings as caught up in some mysterious happening between or through beings. Only an ontology that thinks beings as wholly eventful, as existing just as birth-to-presence (Jean-Luc Nancy), can accommodate wonder, overcoming what Heidegger called the forgetfulness of being and the reign of technology. If such an ontology was worked out carefully, we would be better able to determine whether Heidegger and others are right in claiming that metaphysics and theology, by nature, stifle wonder and forget being. This led to the question: how are we to think of beings as occurring within the event of being? In other words, how might we think monism, while still affirming the (“internal”) difference between being and beings, and between various beings? This problem of unity-in-difference, I discovered, was not so much a Heideggerian theme (see Identity and Difference) as a general German interest beginning with the early Romantics and continuing through the absolute idealists. Hegel’s Geist and Heidegger’s Ereignis are two expressions of a continuous (but varied) German longing for lost unity. By holding up monism as the philosophical accommodation of wonder, I find myself in the company of Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel and Heidegger. However, the likes of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Deleuze are also monists, but their ontologies do not uphold the sovereignty of harmony or unity. So if monism is necessary to accommodate wonder ontologically, not just any monism will do. I came to see that ontological sameness, or the constitutive inherence of beings in being, can only hold as long as beings actively mediate the event of being. An entity that stands outside or after the event of being, would not be one with being, and could not inspire wonder. The forgetfulness of being, the age of technology and calculating subjectivity all involve the interpretation of beings as subsisting outside being, which takes the position of a deistic first cause. My task, then, was to think the very actuality of beings as their mediation of being – which includes their showing of being as truth, goodness and beauty. This implies that being calls for its mediation – bringing us into Hegelian territory (and before that, Spinoza, and further still, Neo-Platonism), to which the dependence of being on beings in Heidegger is heir.  (these additions were made in the attempt to unify writing under one or two central themes/problems) Ontological difference/sameness; giving and given. Wonder. *What is the relation between giving and given? How to be true to excess as well as non-dualism? And must giving be thought of as promise, interminable event? Is giving essentially interminable? Interminable movement toward belonging. The Event of Giving. But why interminability required to ensure not post-sistence? Birth-to-presence. Wonder relates to beings as that in which Being is currently a birth-to-presence. Now wonder in the face of being’s mediation through beings seems to require the thought of inexhaustible mediation. The eventfulness of being, with its associated truth, goodness and beauty, is interminable. Its mediation must be endlessly supplemented. Thus being can never “finally arrive”, it “withdraws” even as it discloses itself invisibly in visible things. But this is not a limitation, as if a fully arrived presence would be preferable. The vitality and generosity of being can only occur to us through suggestion, withdrawal, the promise of more. The very impossibility of being’s exhaustive occurrence is what makes this event possible and necessary as an ongoing drama. Only a neverending story is essentially worth telling and hearing. An event that only holds our interest for a certain time is not intrinsically interesting. Searching for a principle of interminability, I came upon a curious property of the act of gratitude. If a giver shares himself with a recipient, then that recipient is called to share-in the giver to fulfil that sharing. But this sharing-in must take the form of an acknowledgement of the otherness of what is shared, otherwise there would be grasping, not sharing. Gratitude is sharing-in the other by attributing the presence of the shared to the other’s generosity. The givenness of the shared is good for me, and my initiation into this good was the other’s doing, and so I must be grateful, enjoying this good only by appropriating it to the other. Now grateful sharing-in is inseparable from self-sharing, for which the original sharer is called to be grateful in turn. Self-sharing calls for self-sharing. One good turn calls for another. The making-ours of one person can only be completed by the making-ours of the other person, in such a way that this life of giving can never reach final completion or equilibrium. The interminable life of giving, based on the impossibility of adequate gratitude (and the impulse to give in the first place), appears to be a unity-in-difference that is always incipient, thus allowing different participants to be (on the way to) “the same.” The interplay of gift is the birth of unity-in-difference; the immanent activity enacted between those who give is such that it does not approach completion, and therefore allows them to be one thing with being-as-giving (as opposed to beings outside of being-as-giving). If we think being as giving, and giving as endless interplay, then beings can be thought of as one with being inasmuch as beings are givers. Based on this thought I hope to outline an ontology, or account of the ontological difference/sameness, that can do justice to wonder, and perhaps even vindicate metaphysics after Heidegger. The various issues that this project must raise can be derived from the words in the title. An alternative title could be: Receptive Existence and the Birth of Community. Or: Unity and Time. Or Non-identical repetition (includes notion both of openness of time or eschatology, and secondary hypostasis/receptivity/gratitude). Issues/themes: Hegel: readings, shortcomings, insights. Secondary existence: applications, how it overcomes problems, middle way, relation to Desmond, dogma. Is this upheld in Hegel? Henry. Community/unity requires single origin/paternity? What about evil, non-unity, irreducible differences? Repetition. Time, openness of unity. Perhaps by impossibility of absolute externalisation of first giver, since primary causation exceeds secondary. Birth. Hierarchy of causes. Sacred Vow or Presentation of Eternal Unity/Bond. Beauty. The Sublime. Extremes to be avoided. Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Marion, Deleuze, Henry? Compatibilities: of agape and eros, impossibility of pure agape (identical repetition). Self-mediation. Original self-difference. How does this relate to difference/the other. Why need to externalise unity of self or community? Can this be finally achieved? Belonging. Idea of completed belonging. Of interminable striving for belonging. Twoness and oneness of belonging. Significance of open time/wonder for relationships. Fatherhood, Motherhood, Childhood. Life Event Desire. Pneuma. Universal. Tie to Singular, secondary possession. Exspiration. Inspiration. Geist. July 2006 1. Spinoza on one Substance. 2. The (early) German Romantic movement. Books by Frederick Beiser, Dieter Henrich, Mannheim Frank and Andrew Bowie. 3. Holderlin on love as principle of unity. August – September – October 4. Unity-and-difference in Hegel: The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate; The differenz schrift. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Commentaries by William Desmond, Beiser, Taylor, Werner Marx, Heidegger… November – December 5. William Desmond’s “metaxology” which seems to involve an endless dialectic of gift, appropriating but going beyond Hegel. ½ Jan to Feb 2007 6. Bruaire’s ontology of gift drawing on German Idealism. 7. Pannenberg’s Hegelian Trinitarian ontology. March 8. John Milbank’s ambivalent relation to Hegel. And Michel Henry. 9. secondary hypostasis in Trinitarian theology. That would take care of the central readings, supplemented by the following. “Interplay” April 10. Gadamer on play in art; Aristotle on immanent act. 11. Play, Playfulness of liturgy, perhaps. May 12. Dialogue as interplay. “Gift” June 13. Mauss, Marion, Derrida, Bordieu? July 14. Milbank, Pickstock, Schmitz. August – September 15. Dieter Henrich on gratitude. “Birth” 16. Ereignis in Heidegger. 17. Chretien and Marion on “the call.” October 18. Birth-to-presence in Nancy 19. Future in Levinas and Derrida. November 20. Eschatology in Milbank, Pickstock, Zizioulas, Leithart, Kearney. 21. The Implicit in Bohm and Dilthey? 22. Inexaustibility, ineffability, apophatics. Desmond, Ross, “In the Throe of Wonder.” “Unity” December 23. Unity in communio theology, perichoresis, extrinsicism. January 2008 24. Life in Bergson 25. Sympathy in Scheler. “Difference” February 26. Deleuze. March 2008 27. Milbank, Betz and Hart’s criticisms. 28. Other difference texts. Reciprocity Asymmetry. Interminability. Universality. Bruaire, Pannenberg, Desmond. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas. French: Mauss, Derrida, (economy), Marion, Henry, Lacoste, Chretien, (play in liturgy), Deleuze, Nancy, Merleau-Ponty, de Lubac, Bergson. German: Otto, von Balthasar, Scheler, Gadamer, Romantics, Henrich. English: Milbank, Pickstock, Kearney, Hankey, Betz, Hart, Ross. Neo-Thomism, throe of wonder, difference. Communio, modern theology, heythrop, angelaki, EJP, new blackfriars, IJST, difference.org. amazon, leithart, ben guyer. Theology, effervescence. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 19th, 2006
5:30 pm	metaxological and dialectical Nucleus with three branches: Receptivity - the holy (source of rootedness, belonging, feeding, and therefore interminable act. Rest/work distinction) See note in bold on excessive call below. Holy/excessive as Nature). Person/nature distinction, like Father's internal distinction. Link with Desmond note just below. - eternity - unity *** Ideas to pursue: 1.To think out thoroughly the consequences for gift and giving, the notion of being as act, in which possession of being is only had in the mode of giving. Energy/life is only present as a passing through. The branch only has life as joined to the vine. Absolutely Singular giving impossible because giving must give itself for repetition. 2.The consequences on interminable giving of the notion of open integrity. A sequence of integrities allows one to receive the other and re-give the other to himself. If the other had no integrity could not receive him, if had absolute integrity could not participate in him. *** Reading: "Desire, Knowing and Otherness" in Desire, Dialectic and Otherness by Willliam Desmond. Desmond wants to take something from Hegel, the idea of dialectical self-mediation, which is necessary to go beyond the dualism of self/other, subject/object, but go beyond that also, to uphold intermediation, in which many active centres are involved in a community of being. My response is that there can be a distinction between transcendent agent and singular agent, like the distinction between Father as substance and Father as numerically different person. Multiple mediation, or intermediation is compatible with self-mediation or dialectic, if the latter is the work of a substance or geist or life rather than one individual. In fact, I would want to show that intermediation requires the self-mediation of One, that the metaxological doesn't go beyond the dialectical, but is another aspect of the same dynamic. The dynamic difference is what is at stake, ref to my outline of the ontology of reciprocity. Current Music: don't you forget about me (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
6:33 pm	Manifestation and Difference Mani-festation and Difference Essence is never manifested purely or without modulating emphasis. Human being is never shown without the specification of male or female. To manifest human being as a distinct human being is to manifest it in this way rather than that, to emphasise certain possibilities in the essence of humanity over others. Here, manifestation (of human being/essence) necessarily involves modulation. In the language of Maximus the Confessor, the one logos (essence, nature, physis, ousia) of human being only ever occurs in distinct tropoi (hypostases, modes of being/manifestation). To admit that tropos or mode opens up the manifestation of logos or essence just by limiting that manifestation – not so much by excluding or denying moments of that essence as by emphasising and de-emphasising, bringing some aspects to the foreground, simultaneously keeping their complements as background – is already to hit upon the truth of substance, essence or logos. Ousia is a unity of being, but not one that is defined without reference to difference, without relation to its modal/tropic/hypostatic manifestation. Essential unity is an active relation between differences, the dynamic harmonisation of diversely emphasised manifestations of that essence. Human being, taken as a repeatable nature (not by excluding the note of individual personhood but by signifying individuality indefinitely rather than definitely, by including the notion of a single human being, but not of this single human being) does not have its unity as an essence standing above sexual (and other) difference(s), but is nothing but the truth of the harmonisation of man and woman. Human being as such has its integrity as a repeatable essence just because it is the power to unite man and woman in their co-revelation of the one essence of humanness. The essential unity of human substance is born to presence in the beautiful difference between man and woman. Man and woman are two tropes of the one logos, such that in the differential space of their encounter there radiates the truth of their common but different manifestation of human being. It takes plural and different signification to signify clearly. If man only ever appeared, one would get the impression that his maleness were the deepest, most substantial or universal level of his existence. Masculinity would not be a mode of manifesting a common human being, but a nature in its own right. But with the (redeemed and redeeming) co-appearance of man and woman it becomes clear that male and female are not merely natures in their own right, but modes or tropes or ways of manifesting a (differently) shared being. There in the phenomenal inter-ference of masculinity and femininity we are shown a truth that unites them both. Not that we are called to “transcend” the level of sexual difference to contemplate a non-sexual human essence. No: we are called to contemplate the fact that human being as such is the wondrous meeting of man and woman. Human being: the fertile encounter between differences, rather than a unified substance that stands above differences. Humanness-as-perichoresis (differential unity, or harmony, of man-and-woman) is brought to light only with the co-manifestation of man and woman. Human perichoresis can only be signified by triangulation. It takes the inter-presence of the different to release each trope/mode into its truth as sign of a greater truth. In the absence of its complement one trope tends to present only itself as if it spoke only for itself. This suggests that signs need their co-signs to signify, or else they collapse into non-signs presenting only themselves. Only with the presence of its co-sign does a sign enter into the openness and relationality that makes for the reception of a deeper mystery. The site of this event of truth is not a single sign, which cannot fulfil its role on its own, but the unity of sign and co-sign. This would not surprise us if we remembered that the mystery that eventuates is dynamism, harmony, beautiful movement between differences, the gifting of difference to difference. A single “sign” could not bear such a movement into the open, for the open in which this beauty lives is opened between differences, as their very between. An isolated sign, if it can signify at all, tends to bespeak stasis, the (false) unity of being-here-complete-in-one-spot. But true form is just the power to unify different manifestations of that form, thereby giving birth to those differences, at once moving them together and apart. Original unity has an essential relation to difference and mani-festation (plural, differential manifestation). Original unity is nothing more than that relation. 760 wds 18/4/06 Current Mood: fidgety Current Music: If you wanna be my lover (Comment on this)