Without leaving home,
You may be acquainted with the universe;
Without prying into windows of knowledge,
You may be acquainted with the Dao.
The further you may travel, the less you might know.
Hence the master travels not, yet is knowledgeable,
He sees without looking;
He works without doing.Tao Te Ching, 47
The self is not prior to the experience. Experience as such is necessarily a communion, an interaction between two real entities; the first-person experience is a composite object, a relational phenomenon where you, and the mineness of your first-person presence, are in communion with an external object (either in the physical world or as an idea; even an idea you can think of is an “external object” in this sense).
In this sense, you’re never alone - you’re always in communion with another. You’re always in touch with the real outside of yourself by simply being conscious of anything whatsoever.
In other words, there’s no such thing as the isolated, individual self. That’s just a fiction. In many ways a colonial, imperial and neoliberal construct; an adjunct ideological machinery geared to support extraction, subjugation and domination.
A reduction predicated on the virtual but metaphysically impossible separation of the component parts of the primary lived relational subjectivity. Yep. Read that again. Out loud.
I am you and you are me. Not exhaustively and literally so, but there’s a profound interdependence that cannot be adequately described by Cartesian anthropological monism.
There’s really no separate, disengaged, abstract subject set apart from the love, from the bloody, dirty, chaotically rational humanity or robust animality of the embodied natures of one another.
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And the realization of all this is so painful I can hardly bear it in all its relentless beauty. I’d seen the light shine through for years, but didn’t realize something had to tear the scales away.
It’s the violent piercing of skin, of armor old as fuck, nine inches deep, inside of which was starvation counterposed by almost nothing but a cold rationalization.
Sure, faith grew in this hard ground. It really did, and that was probably for the best.
But that egg apparently had to crack at some point. And it hurts more than anything I think I’ve ever known. Fuck you for breaking it. I thought I was perfectly fine. And fuck you, dog, for dying. I love you so much more than your little mind could ever know.
But every other option is gone. I simply cannot reduce everything to my own intellection or experience anymore, much as I’d try.
It’s inevitably also in yours.
I’m in yours.
The external world is in all of ours together. I now actually get that there’s possible an immediate intuitive participation in the being-in-the-world of another.
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Yeah, sure, I’ve actually got arguments. As much as I’m beginning to loathe analytical philosophy, I’ll be happy to string together a set for you.
So the intentionalities of external others are immediately available to your phenomenal presence. To your “essential ownness”, to your subjectivity. Your consciousness.
When I touch your hand, when I kiss you on the mouth, or when we play field hockey together, you immediately encounter an intentional presence that you can’t control. A presence you can’t own and dominate. A cause impacting upon your being which is essentially unpredictable and doesn’t reduce to your will or intellection.
Something alive and Other.
And through this, we immediately unlock the conceptual and metaphysical possibility of patterns of experience that are qualitatively predicated upon the intersection between the intentionalities of the self and of others. No, I’m not kidding.
There’s more. When your actual being-in-the-world gets filtered by the intentionalities of others; when your experience actually takes part IN and THROUGH these external intentionalities, opening patterns of participation in being that are wholly inaccessible to yourself alone…
Well, then you’re not really a Cartesian abstraction anymore, are you?
Haruka’s emphasis on the Japanese self-part equivalent to the “I” of European languages brings the broader truth into focus here:
Your complex self absolutely has an irreducible self-part of an immediate phenomenal subjectivity - it’s precisely what the reductive Cartesian project hinges on, what even makes it conceptually possible - but this self-part can only become manifest, can only exist in relation to another.
And when we go beyond inert perceptibles, rocks and trees, and bring on board the tangible intentionalities of other subjects towards the constitution of the composite object of your self, it becomes clear to our experience that the very root of your subjectivity, the Cartesian self-part, is potentially (yet not always) actualized by the indomitable presence of other complex intentionalities.
You can experience the world through the external intentionalities which you yourself didn’t possess independently.
In other words, tangible phenomenal realities immediately predicated upon the intersection of the intentionalities of the self and of others are actually possible.
These are actually possible modes of our participation in Being, of the sense in which we exist, such that our phenomenal experience can actually be distributed rather than simply Cartesian. Such that I to a certain extent can actually exist by proxy. In and through another.
That I really can see through your eyes.
You get the profound implications of this? It’s the end of the entire modern project. It’s the demise of the peculiar madness of the West, of the lone, objective gaze that dominates, sunders and destroys. It was never real. It was always just a reductive abstraction predicated on a purely formal, merely virtual distinction.
And of course it’s a profound restoration of an analogical affirmation of The Holy Trinity. The perfect relationality within one and the same absolutely simple entity.
Love as the very ground of being.
Just look at these beautiful fucking humans. This wild assemblage of nations and creeds (and your own beloved gaunt vampire freak) took to the streets in exuberant celebration after their weird little ball-pact had run its course. Most didn’t know one another, but we managed to pull off a little Bowie-style free festival right there in the streets. And the intercourse was random, chaotic and magical.
A sort of distilled patterns of commingled intentionalities permeated by openness and charity. All tinged with a turn-of-the-century vibe of impending disaster which made everything that much more urgent, bright and clear.
For tomorrow we die. Hoka-hey.
I especially remember Kien & Nila, whose meandering paths from Toronto and Aboriginal Australia somehow happened to intersect with this descendant of Norse roots all the way out in East Asia. It was somehow like we’d known each other forever.
And they said Canadians were boring. I’ll fight them with all three drops of my Irish blood ‘cause this kid was the spitting image of Kevin McDonald from Kids in the Hall.
Save one, I pray, I’ll almost certainly never see you again. And that’s both harrowing and profoundly beautiful.
So I finally got to meet Hiroyuki, of course. I don’t really have the proper words for that.
And Haruka-san, my former intern. Thanks for everything. I’m not your supervisor anymore. You’re the sensei now, having taught me much more than I could ever pretend to teach you.
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Liv, det är underbart att bli dig nära!
Jag sjönk förundrad i din blonda famn
och glömde för den visdom jag fick lära
all världens ångest och mitt eget namn.Jag sökte irrande en skammens källa
och kom förvånad till en helig brunn.
O du min stjärna. Ave maris Stella.
Liv — du har segrat, kom och kyss min mun!+++
(Wondrous it is to draw near
to you, Life
Amazed I fell into your blonde embrace
And for the wisdom that I learned
Forgot all the world’s distress
And mine own nameMeandering I sought a source of shame
Yet found a sacred spring, perplexed
O my star. Ave maris Stella
Life - you have conquered. Come kiss me on the mouth.)Anna Greta Wide. (1942.) “Liv!”. Nattmusik.
I am he
As you are he
As you are me
And we are all together
An enjoyable and uplifting morning read. Darren Allen uses the term 'Panjective', which I like a lot. He defines as the soft edged pre-objective and pre-subjective awareness (i.e. that which is aware of both Things that are 'out there' and Thoughts and Feeling which are 'in here. Gives Deep Meaning and Hilarious Nudity to mere facts, and to mere me. Synonym of Quality. -Apocalypedia