This post will be accessible and everyone especially people who are not me will readily understand
Met with the ol' surgeon the other day. Looks like we can plan the limited vivisection for about three months from now, and I'll have limited mobility for a couple months afterwards. Huzz... ah... I suppose. It was a bit disappointing. I guess because meds have me basically stable that this is technically an elective surgery, which means the surgeon's attitude, by some combination of necessary ethics and poor bedside manner, was to only give me "the facts" and remain "sure" not to say anything that "might be understood" as compelling me "for or against any medical intervention." I was not in the head space for that. I had in mind more a we've tried the more conservative options, this is the next logical step.
For the past week or so things have felt spiraling out of controly. I don't want to think about any of this, and alternating combinations of anxiety and legitimate medical concern have resulted in some responsibilities slipping outside of optimal management parameters. I became conscious of my precarious mental state this morning and took a moment to pray, then carefully but briefly reflected on the matters at hand and decided that, given the situation I've presently found myself in, I'm presently and at least for the last couple days have done everything I can reasonably do. Then I successfully set aside my concerns to the tribunal of fate.
Consequently, I managed to spend the morning in an enduring and refreshing peace. I had to limp about for a while to accomplish some chores, and the autumn world, unoppressed by my plans and anxieties, opened up around me with a bare and comforting spatiality.
The experience has helped me in trying to understand a philosophical problem that has been at the back of my mind, of what use to make of Hesiod and certain examples of postmodernism, with respect to their status as historical constitutions of the horizons of the project of western thought. I have been trying to mutually situate the givenness of things in the history of metaphysics, i.e. as ostensive things relative to the ground of a transcendental posited by thought and on the basis of which their being is given, and the bare givenness of things beyond the scope of that history and mode of functioning.
I suppose that the philosopher, if they are to approach the matter comprehensively, must be capable of moving between the experience of the bare givenness of things at the horizon of thought, as is sometimes made available in art or religion*, and the experience of things which have been constituted in thought.
I've, variously, in my personal history, neurotically erected one or the other as an absolute ideal of experience. Either option now seems, speaking of the matter comprehensively, as a dangerous error. The romantic motivation for retreat to the horizons of thought has, in its abstraction, a reactionary character in opposition to the emancipatory promise of thinking. Conversely, the tyranny of thought, in its proper abstraction, alienates life for illusion and abstraction, as romantics have often rightly indicated. Yet, it would make sense for thought to arise objectively from the state at its horizons, and that state to be objectively determined in the content of thought.
Even in the vulgarities of my personal history, my retreat to the bare givenness of things is a retreat to a functioning element of reality which has already been determined by the operation of thought. At the barest level, the ongoing functioning of my organism requires provisions that have been made available through the categories of thinking. I return, even in returning beyond those categories, to that organism which has been so supplied. The reality is of course more complicated than this barest example, which merely illustrates the point. I was welcomed this morning to a world of bare spatiality having previously made certain provisions for my health, career, etc.
The difficulty is that, when one mode of experience is engaged sincerely, the being of the other must in consequence be given as empty. Thought has no positive reality to be elected from the standpoint available at its horizon, neither can the abandonment of thought have any positive reality to the thinker. Yet the effective role of either requires they be engaged with sincerity. How then is a movement between them reasonably available?
In one sense, the meaning of Socrates as a philosophical ideal becomes apparent here. In electing to constitute a law whose vacuity was his very nature to demonstrate, Socrates, and at the ultimate point of mortal action, elects to constitute something which for him must, from the abstract perspective, have been devoid of positive reality. Yet of course exactly then it is no longer void. In the view which I have outlined here, approach the philosophical ideal means approaching by measure this experience of electing what has been given as empty.**
In another sense, the answer is that this movement is not reasonably available, but rather that living must ultimately be a series of sojourns, each of which, from its internal perspective looking out to the absolute, is a matter of becoming entirely lost. In this view, the philosophical virtue, whereby one is capable of this otherwise paradoxical move, amounts to an ability to become, in sequence, lost, momentarily unlost, then lost again; without, that is, too much disturbance. This virtue is certainly furnished to a great degree by that sort of faith made in knowing that things aren't, after all, all up to you; that there is another space to which this responsibility can, and more credibly, be consigned.***
I do not think these two answers to the question contradict one another, realistically speaking. The qualification that we must always speak in measures is easy, but probably still true.
* Although I think that, insofar as they are art or religion, these projects remain with the horizon of thought; and, consequently, that this phenomenon merely indicates how the two modes of experience interpenetrate.
** And thereby constituting it, though not of course yourself. (Fichte here?)
*** The dialectic returns here as well, for we cannot concede this sentiment to its anti-humanist interpretation. The analysis of anthropology, subjectivity, or ontology necessary to negotiate this dialectic would be too distracting here. Certainly, I find theological language useful here, but with my previous qualification still in mind, and with apologies to those uncomfortable with it, for the brief remark along these lines in the opening section.
For the past week or so things have felt spiraling out of controly. I don't want to think about any of this, and alternating combinations of anxiety and legitimate medical concern have resulted in some responsibilities slipping outside of optimal management parameters. I became conscious of my precarious mental state this morning and took a moment to pray, then carefully but briefly reflected on the matters at hand and decided that, given the situation I've presently found myself in, I'm presently and at least for the last couple days have done everything I can reasonably do. Then I successfully set aside my concerns to the tribunal of fate.
Consequently, I managed to spend the morning in an enduring and refreshing peace. I had to limp about for a while to accomplish some chores, and the autumn world, unoppressed by my plans and anxieties, opened up around me with a bare and comforting spatiality.
The experience has helped me in trying to understand a philosophical problem that has been at the back of my mind, of what use to make of Hesiod and certain examples of postmodernism, with respect to their status as historical constitutions of the horizons of the project of western thought. I have been trying to mutually situate the givenness of things in the history of metaphysics, i.e. as ostensive things relative to the ground of a transcendental posited by thought and on the basis of which their being is given, and the bare givenness of things beyond the scope of that history and mode of functioning.
I suppose that the philosopher, if they are to approach the matter comprehensively, must be capable of moving between the experience of the bare givenness of things at the horizon of thought, as is sometimes made available in art or religion*, and the experience of things which have been constituted in thought.
I've, variously, in my personal history, neurotically erected one or the other as an absolute ideal of experience. Either option now seems, speaking of the matter comprehensively, as a dangerous error. The romantic motivation for retreat to the horizons of thought has, in its abstraction, a reactionary character in opposition to the emancipatory promise of thinking. Conversely, the tyranny of thought, in its proper abstraction, alienates life for illusion and abstraction, as romantics have often rightly indicated. Yet, it would make sense for thought to arise objectively from the state at its horizons, and that state to be objectively determined in the content of thought.
Even in the vulgarities of my personal history, my retreat to the bare givenness of things is a retreat to a functioning element of reality which has already been determined by the operation of thought. At the barest level, the ongoing functioning of my organism requires provisions that have been made available through the categories of thinking. I return, even in returning beyond those categories, to that organism which has been so supplied. The reality is of course more complicated than this barest example, which merely illustrates the point. I was welcomed this morning to a world of bare spatiality having previously made certain provisions for my health, career, etc.
The difficulty is that, when one mode of experience is engaged sincerely, the being of the other must in consequence be given as empty. Thought has no positive reality to be elected from the standpoint available at its horizon, neither can the abandonment of thought have any positive reality to the thinker. Yet the effective role of either requires they be engaged with sincerity. How then is a movement between them reasonably available?
In one sense, the meaning of Socrates as a philosophical ideal becomes apparent here. In electing to constitute a law whose vacuity was his very nature to demonstrate, Socrates, and at the ultimate point of mortal action, elects to constitute something which for him must, from the abstract perspective, have been devoid of positive reality. Yet of course exactly then it is no longer void. In the view which I have outlined here, approach the philosophical ideal means approaching by measure this experience of electing what has been given as empty.**
In another sense, the answer is that this movement is not reasonably available, but rather that living must ultimately be a series of sojourns, each of which, from its internal perspective looking out to the absolute, is a matter of becoming entirely lost. In this view, the philosophical virtue, whereby one is capable of this otherwise paradoxical move, amounts to an ability to become, in sequence, lost, momentarily unlost, then lost again; without, that is, too much disturbance. This virtue is certainly furnished to a great degree by that sort of faith made in knowing that things aren't, after all, all up to you; that there is another space to which this responsibility can, and more credibly, be consigned.***
I do not think these two answers to the question contradict one another, realistically speaking. The qualification that we must always speak in measures is easy, but probably still true.
* Although I think that, insofar as they are art or religion, these projects remain with the horizon of thought; and, consequently, that this phenomenon merely indicates how the two modes of experience interpenetrate.
** And thereby constituting it, though not of course yourself. (Fichte here?)
*** The dialectic returns here as well, for we cannot concede this sentiment to its anti-humanist interpretation. The analysis of anthropology, subjectivity, or ontology necessary to negotiate this dialectic would be too distracting here. Certainly, I find theological language useful here, but with my previous qualification still in mind, and with apologies to those uncomfortable with it, for the brief remark along these lines in the opening section.