William James advised us a century ago, the Hegelian “system resembles a mousetrap, in which if you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not entering.” My take is that Hegel, at first, is more like the Sirens Song of ancient Greek mythology. The half bird half woman creatures according to Homer sang their songs so sweetly and divinely that no mortal could resist it and sea wayfarers would jump in the sea and die to reach their island. Certainly, Hegel resembles a sea which surges toward and according to lore ushers in the divine. Well, at least for philosophers that popular mythos holds have no life. If one is to survive Hegel, one must tie oneself to the mask before opening the ears.

In my first post on Hegel, I tried to bring out some underlying structural dynamics. We must stop the common place thinking that a verb must always find a subject (in Hegel the verb is the subject). We need to let the movement of the dialectic be the ‘reality,’ the imminent unfolding of what it is – without hermeneutics and supplementation. It is not a familiar approach to the way we usually use language to process as referent and words as signposts of some other ‘reality.’ Hegel asks or shall we say insists and assumes that the reader will lay down all such notions such as an other ‘reality’ which gives words meaning. To understand Hegel the dialectic itself in a more literal orientation is the underlying semantic and nothing else. Rather, it is a reduction or an assumption of what ‘literal’ means and all else should be laid aside and deferred while the dialectic plays out.

As we proceed through the dialectic, we find that our start was not literal but abstract. We find that the meaning of concrete evolves to take on a different kind of focus. The concrete is not made by nouns upon nouns but by the dynamic play of the dialect itself. We find a proper place for signification which does not depend on an exteriority or excess of meaning but solely on the play of the dialectic dynamic itself. As the ‘concrete’, the ‘proper’ becomes what it is through itself. In Hegelian’s idea, it becomes what it is not by force but by its own working dynamic. It critiques to the point of immediate dismissal any attempt to import objections which comes from outside the text itself. In this way it is like the Siren’s Song. It admits no exteriority to the text or plurality of meaning which is not explicit in the text itself. So, from the start a demand is placed on the reader to suspend critique and simply listen to the dialectic. Certainly, we are told that this is not too high a price to pay for a temporary suspension of importing anything into the text that is not immediately there. This is the price of rigor and scholarship.

As the dialectical song unfolds, we begin to see a temporalizing effect which is made from successions of apparent oppositions which hold open the possibility, the necessity, the door, of transformations. These transformations and their underlying contraries take on a higher and higher order until we find ourselves in the absolute waters of the divine. The temporalizing has taken on the eternal from inherent necessity…and nothing else. The words of the dialectic themselves have leaped from the page into the reality, the thing-in-itself. It’s as if words could, as the Greek logos, be spoken from Hesiod’s ‘before the gods there was chaos’ but now instead of chaos we have the definite, the determinant, the reality of what was always meant but got ‘metaphy-sized’ away. Perhaps the sin of Eve was thinking a concrete apple was something more as the knowledge of good and evil.

In my second essay on Hegel, I tried to bring out the lived world of sensation as an excess in the same way that a mere picture of a girl is exceeded in the Mona Lisa. Certainly, the picture is of a girl or a lady, but it almost seems to do violence to its immediate presence to ignore the plethora da Vinci intends. We do have a phenomenological ‘feeling-in-the-world.’ And it does not seem unrealistic to think of this temporalizing place as an excess of meaning to the literal semantic of a syntax. It also seems as if there is an indeterminacy of how this excess is related to language. There is a relationship, but it seems a bit hazy. Certainly, some specificity can be achieved by thinking rigorously about its expression in presence. I can hear the Hegelian now pedagogically point out but if it is indeterminate that is itself a determinacy so how can it be indeterminate? So true, in the literal meaning of the concept, but does that suffice as the picture of a girl suffices for the Mona Lisa? Can the Hegelian approach be used as a kind of violence and force? Well, certainly it has. Let’s take the case of Karl Marx and how communism realized itself in history.

As I and many others have pointed out Karl Marx in the mid-eighteen hundreds living in England and resisted the horror and darkness of the English industrial revolution where child labor and black lung disease from mining long hours with little pay made for short lives. Marx actively opposed the violent and brutal monarchies of his time and had no futuristic knowledge of what would become of his notion of communism in the Russian revolution which happened long after his death. In Marx’ communist ideal, violence would be replaced with meaning found in work and ownership of the product of one’s labor. It was the 19^th century idea of entrepreneurship, work which provided for needs but also dialectically joined the laborer and his work to usher in an epoch of integration not alienation. However, in the twentieth century we saw that such an ideal, non-hierarchical notion was replaced with authoritarianism of the worst and most brutal kind. The ideal which found its appeal in its material dialectic was replaced with a tragic nightmare of inhuman proportions. Likewise, today we see the intrinsic beauty of the notion of democracy being subjugated to the violence of authoritarianism. We have yet to see the brutal history that will unfold if we cannot pull ourselves back from the brink of this abyss.

Karl Marx was the father of dialectical materialism. It was founded upon Hegelianism without the brutality of the German bourgeoisie. The Marxist dialectic did not empower and protect the ruling hierarchy of power but founded the dialectic upon lived life, work and the empowerment of ownership as an imminent reality in and of itself in practice, achievement, and self-realized ownership of one’s engagement and creation – production. For Marx, that was the real value of work not abstract capital. However, certainly we have seen that the dialectic did not remain as it was in and of itself but became the vehicle through which its antithesis was worked out in history. The dialectic did not remain its own immanent reality but the product of other’s authoritarian nightmare. I see no reason why Hegel’s Philosophy of Right cannot and has not been used to authorize the sanctity of the horrific State. In all this I am trying to show an excess to what scholars would think as the proper place of Hegelian dialecticism. True, I am describing a kind of dark Sartrean hell of no escape but nevertheless a monstrous excess to what Hegel himself most likely intended has certainly been historic consequence. The spinoffs from Hegelianism certainly demonstrate the power of Hegel’s works as was furthermore evident in Existentialism and British Empiricism.

As an excommunicated Hegelian, Kierkegaard wanted to bring out the excess in lived experience which Hegelian dialectics seemed to dismiss or transform into a moment of the dialectic. He could not counter it directly as many intellectuals have rightly surmised but questioned it relevance, at least in the way Hegel meant it. There are and have been many schools of Hegelianism and it is not unlike all the denominationalism which prevails in many religions. Kierkegaard realized that a direct assault on Hegel was incredibly difficult if not impossible so in opposing Hegelianism he relied on its seeming inadequacy in lived experience and its absurdity in believing it can account for the excess of experience; action and responsibility in having to put the book down and make decisions, live, work, die and face death as the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein (the there of being or human being) in an everyday world. How could Hegel answer this excess which wisdom requires? For Kierkegaard, the passion of existence he called faith was damped down by dialectics and thus, lacked the ability to answer the call of existence. In Nietzsche we find that dialectics is the priestly mediocre, the tired values of good and evil which dampens heroic life-affirming ascent and condemns it to the drudgery of the last man. He criticizes many philosophers as chastised preachers of descendent ethics which boil in their continued resentment and vengeance of life and sour the high places of creativity and the epoch-bestowing ascendency of the Übermensch which spins off worlds and gives birth to millennium of meaning and purpose.

It is important to note that the power of Hegelianism has spun off reactions in Marxism and Capitalism in both continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. Beyond existentialism, continental philosophy, finds its place in history. In structuralism, post-structuralism, modernism, post-modernism and the advent of Žižek which founds a most radical form of Hegelianism and sociological formation of Lacan whom others have deemed the ‘dangerous philosopher’. I have no doubt that there are many new forms of Hegelianism yet to come. In the British Empiricists and Adam Smith, we also see a radical and direct reaction to Hegelian and German Idealism. Both communism and capitalism find their creation of Hegel. There is no way to exempt these major historic trends from the work of G.W. Hegel. The enmeshments are undeniable. We also find immediate and radical reaction against Hegel in analytic philosophy, both its beginnings and its round about return to Hegel in ‘Pittsburg Hegelianism” have cued us in on how Hegel is like Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence of the same’ which has yet become new again.

Analytic philosophy may have started in the historic swamps of Newton’s absolute time and space, Latin’s metaphysics of nature (nātūrālis (neuter nātūrāle, adverb nātūrāliter)) and the British Empiricists naïve reflections on sensations and later on pragmatism. However, now we have seen relativity and, I would say, even epistemic problems which continental philosophy has toiled with in the desert becoming center stage in analytic philosophy.  It comes as a corrected Kantianism that is the “sociality and historicity of reason, the proper treatment of space and time, conceptual holism, inferentialism, the reality of conceptual structure, the structure of experience, and the nature of normativity are the central concerns of Pittsburgh Hegelianism.” (deVries)

Analytic philosophy abhorred the mentalism of German Idealism and embarked on a reactionary journey to realism. Realism was considered fundamental to any such notion as reality. It saw language as the product of speech acts which had their place in a concrete world. It also took on the 19^th century metaphysic of mechanics in the absolute time and space of Newton. However, from the start analytic philosophy saw the pitfalls of atomism and how fundamental axioms played a decisive role in the thematics which follow. The atomism inadvertently brought about in and through analytic philosophy shows itself in the Mises school most vividly where words are a creation act which have an almost mechanical individualistic kind of generational iteration founded upon rote learning. Speech is brought under the rubric of an act, a reenactment of an interlocution of players performing speech as act. Language can be private but in so doing fails pragmatically in paring itself off from its purpose to communicate.

While Pittsburg Hegelianism is not your mother’s Hegelianism it is cognizant of the contributions Hegel made to language as collective and historic. It seems to have displaced the monadist atomism of individualism (what I call the metaphysic of individualism) and finally come to grips with a ‘science’ which desires to let phenomenon come to the fore without imposing an underlying structure such as individualism but rather to observe scientifically the phenomenon which shows itself on in its own irruptive presence. This has a lot in common with new schools of philosophy which do not take Hegel to be metaphysical but literal in the unfolding of the dialectic. These recent Hegelians seem to abhor the metaphysics of presumption as much as their alter egos (which may not be so alter anymore) in Pittsburg Hegelianism. While analytic philosophy has been the love child of conservatism for several centuries, there are actually left and right schools in Pittsburg Hegelianism. It seems that the monadism inherit in the rhetoric of capitalism has been displaced to some extent by a more dynamic attention to socialization and language-meaning which cannot be privatized without losing something essential in the speech act and its interlocution. However, this rendering reminds me more of Saussure’s referential signs upon signs constituting wholes of meaning and syntax which are not processed in some serialization fashion but are encountered less singularly and more holistically. Nevertheless, abalytic philosophers still seem to be firmly rooted in their historic notion of experience as sensation and not unmoored from individual experience.

In conclusion, let me return to my beginning in somewhat of a dialectical rhetoric device to transform the Siren’s Song to Medusa. Again, Medusa was female (do we see an empirical pattern here). She was beautiful but terrible (hmm). And like Hegel, it seems that whenever the head of Hegel is cut off it only produces more heads. Or, perhaps the gaze of Orpheus is the scientific fact of Hegel’s work. Whether the solemn gaze is Blanchot’s living, monstrous death of words which live in the entropic graveyard of epitomes reminiscent of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein or Jaques Lacan’s terror of the real in which we are thrown from and to the phantasmas of yearning and desires in the symbolic, we seem to be doomed to never be able to exit the dialectics of Hegel and the eternal recurrence of the same.

As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying…. I have no relationship with it, it is that toward which I cannot go, for in it I do not die, I have fallen from the power to die. In it they die; they do not cease, and they do not finish dying ― Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death.

I refuse this speech by which you speak to me, this discourse that you offer me to attract me to it in calming me, the time in which your successive words last, in which you hold me back in the presence of an affirmation, is above all this relation that you create between us just by the fact that you address speech to me even in my silence. — “Who are you?” — “The refusal to take part in discourse, to make a pact with a law of discourse.” — “Do you prefer tears, laughter, immobile madness?” — “I speak, but I do not speak in your discourse: I do not let you, speaking, speak, I force you to speak not speaking [je t’oblige à parler ne parlant pas]; there is no help for you, no instant in which you rest from me, I who am there in all your words before all your words.” — “I have invented the great logos of logic that protects me from your incursions and allows me to speak and to know in speaking through the peace of well developed words” — “But I am there in your logic also, denouncing the oppression of a coherence that makes itself the law and I am there with my violence that affirms itself under the mask of your legal violence, that which submits thought to the grip of comprehension. ― Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au delà (Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame)

Part something of nothing called cross-eyed and tired…

Works Cited

deVries, W. A. (n.d.). Hegel’s Revival in Analytic Philosophy. University of New Hampshire. Retrieved from https://mypages.unh.edu/sites/default/files/wad/files/devries_hegels_revival_in_analytic_philosophy.pdf

Is language hopelessly bogged into its own ability to be able, the ‘yes’ which must always precede and welcome its ownmost possibility? Does thought revolve incessantly upon itself, hermetically sealed in its absoluteness? Must language always circumscribe and prescribe possibility and encounter? Is it possible that the universality of such a language does violence to the caress, the press of owns skin upon the other of desire? What shall we say of the effect of language which can only be signifier upon signifier or negation pressed into transformation of higher orders while sustain its predecessors in dialectic certainty? Is this how we arrive at speech acts or acts as such; acts as sentiment, love, hatred, dismissal, encounter, wonder, beauty, awe. How does language as dialectic move from its ground in and of itself into gesture, profound lyric poetry, the muse of music which at once animates and announces experiential temporalizing moments of joy, sadness, despair, longing without ever needing to utter a word? Isn’t idea realizing itself as it is in itself only mimicking the movement of some other kind of language-passion? If Hegel’s language is complete, admits of no exteriority to itself as it ingests exteriority in the same and other, how can it rise into life, the desire of provocation and emotive immersion, baptism of expression which has yet to find its ‘proper’ words? In Hegel’s dialectic have we not just privileged the Idea to the point of extinction of anything else which could possibly exceed it? To be sure, not to exceed it as words which could never counter or even hope to counter systemic Concept. The ‘counter’ of which I allude can never face the dialectic in and on its own terms. It could never expose a presupposition which the System takes no account of. However, to live in the totality of the System is to live alone in the solitude of thought which can never address an other except in forgetfulness. Could it be that dialectic must forget itself in order to live, to approach the he or the she which inspires and contests, touches, and retreats, despairs and places the weight of existence and non-existence heavily upon our inwardness, our years and presses on our every-daynesses. Do we die in Hegel’s System? Do we face the dreaded moment in the certitude of Concept? Isn’t this Idea the tragic comedy, the Monty Python of absurdity? Isn’t there a radical reduction in language as in and of itself, the theatre of the absurd? How do we give place to human sensual immersion as ‘meaningful’ and ‘significant’ without reducing it to idea or supplementing it with the text? Certainly, I do not mean this excess as mystical or unrelated to language. The relationship is not reductive to language. Neither does it find place without language. There is a relationship, but the relationship is absolutely indeterminable. No bridge of thought can substitute or take account of the absolute excess which engulfs and fires our passions; at least, without totalizing it, taking it as the same as its idea and thus, propelling it into the absurd. Perhaps the most profound thought humanity has ever encountered is the impossible excesses which we can only mortally mark and hold in unknowing, the awareness of our inability to be able, the joy and wonder of what cannot be but what must absolutely be.

Part 2 of Infinity

Reflections reflects. As such it necessarily posits a distance from itself as if to observe itself. Yet, the ‘itself’ is not yet a ‘self’ but a moment suspended upon the emptiness of a verb absent a subject. The object of reflection can no longer be the subject of reflection. Thus, the impossibility of sustaining itself is brought to the fore. As such, it must face its extinction in every junction. Its nothingness is what must come to the fore. In this then, Hegel arrives at immediacy. From the start of the Hegel’s “Logic” we must then follow a progression from being and nothingness to becoming which must untie itself from its apparent Gordian Knot towards pure concept which has no transcendence or metaphysics but can only remain as a totality whose founding is only of and in itself. Only the leap into exteriority can account for metaphysics which can then only be the forgottenness of the System. The question emerges have we finally unraveled the Gordian Knot or only proven its existence?

Desire is the leap to absolute emptiness which can only begin again immediacy and mediation. And thus, renew again Hegel’s epic ground whose ‘ungrund’ (un-ground) can only weave once again the dialectic of the Logic. Even ‘logic’ as ‘formal logic’ must take a backseat in the beginning chapters. Hence, a new kind of ‘Logic’ is thrust upon us as what must arise prior to formal logic’s inception. Thus, the tools of formal logic, based on the principle of non-contradiction, and its refinement into symbolic logic must be deferred in obeyance to the ghastly shadows in which being and nothing find oppositions and transformations into becoming. We cannot yet call this ‘logic’ as that has yet to find its moment when it must be what it is in itself and for itself. In this then we see the appropriateness of succession. We must wait for the appropriate unveiling, the proper moment, when rigorous Logic which is not yet formal logic can find its place, ‘stasis,’ which needs nothing other than itself to be what it is.

Let’s recap the topics which serve as margins or notes to the one without an other which is the unfolding of the dialectic. We have an abstract start in immediacy and mediacy. Its pure abstraction is nothing other than the ostensive statement of itself, nothing more, nothing less. The machinery of what it is itself and for itself must only be assumed as nothing more (so cannot be reduced to the 19^th century metaphysics of mechanical). Its impossibility drives it into becoming without any supplementation. We are rigorously reduced to strict acceptance until the further development can be unveiled in its necessity, its essence. We must employ the oppositions of Logic without yet requiring a formal logic. Yet, we have retained a proper, a succession in the dialectic in which further developments will immediately follow without supplementation. So, we also have the appropriate, the proper, without yet establishing it until later perhaps. In this then we are reminded of Derrida’s supplementation to the text which in Hegel can no longer claim a timeless critique but must finds its time in the dialectic. In its proper moment we will see that the improper is demanding supplementation prior to the formal establishment of the legitimacy of how proper and improper arise in their proper place. There is a temporality of succession, of dialectic progression, which must be employed in order to establish the ‘proper’s’ necessity in itself. This then shall not have been called deferment unless you failed by virtue (another topic) of your hasty indolence to lead into metaphysical objections prior to the upcoming necessity. Can we suggest that relativity, the pausing of the moment, to found its proper moment has now been recruited into the service of the absolute? Can we think, ‘force’ yet?

Part One of Infinity…

A Brief History of Stasis

The ancient Greeks were recipients of ideas as they were the hub of trade for the ancient world. Pythagoras’ geometry was certainly a direct gift of the Egyptians. Indirectly, the Egyptian’s theory of triangles made the Great Pyramids possible. I think it could be argued that the ancient Egyptians were fascinated with the idea of the straight line. Think of their pottery and their tombs. Almost always circumscribed and inscribed with straight lines, rectangles and squares, set in two dimensions. What better environment to think of the relationship of angles and lengths in geometric objects? Perhaps the essence of this fascination was the novelty of straight lines in nature. The clarity of lines, boundaries and demarcations made possible the Great Pharaohs who must continually one-up their successor in the quest for Immortality resulting in the Great Pyramid’s geometry and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. We know that ancient Greeks were not only aware of the Egyptians’ history, but some actually travelled to Egypt to study.

Then, there was the influence of the Near East. The fascination with math and numbers which resulted in the decimal system and even primitive calculators in their day. Numbers reveled to reality of the shadows of nature (in Platonic tones). Numbers not only brought clarity to trade but to the cosmos; astronomical measurements of nature which were precise and supported equinox and solstice and impacted agriculture. The Egyptians were also co-conspirators in this wealth of budding knowledge. Numbers and math revealed a geometry behind the scenes; a transformation from nature to what the ancient Greeks thought in terms of phusis (termed physics today) and first principles or origins of the big bang in another mode of contemporary thought (thought through Latin transformations as metaphysics).

Also, we have the influence of the Far East, the Orient. The direction of their thought encompasses the essential circularity of nature. Reflect on the circularity of their art and their philosophy in the early Upanishads. Think of the understated minimalism of the ancient Chinese paintings and art. The questions of chance and existence subsumed by what the Greek’s thought as fate were taken up into the intrinsic play of singularity and multiplicity, the many and the one, the Atman and the Brahman; all the great accomplishment on nature (phusis copied in the Latin thought as naturalis; Latin Adjective . nātūrālī. dative masculine singular of nātūrālis; dative feminine singular of nātūrālis; dative neuter singular of nātūrālis; ablative masculine singular of nātūrālis; ablative feminine singular of nātūrālis; ablative neuter singular of nātūrālis).

In all this we find the nexus of the Ancient Greeks. They did not invent out of nothing; they invented out of everything. They could well be thought as clever thieves of their happenstance. And what of their early thoughts of the cosmos? Strains of ethnocentrism show up as the Mediterranean being the concentric center of the cosmos. The sun, moon and planets revolved around the earth in concentric spheres (circles) of earth as what we now know as middle earth in fiction and the Mediterranean region in geography and sky which demarcated the complement of mortals the expanse of the gods.

Later in Latin thought the geometry and confluence of Greek thought was taken up as the heliocentric of the Absolute God of Constantinople and Christianity. Neo-Platonic thought was copied into Christian dogma and the budding and controversial power struggle of the early catholic (universal) Church and the gnostic strains of Christendom and paganism resulting in power relations of a reformulated ‘eternal’ (as contra-distinct-ed from earlier formulations of eons or ages, epochs) heaven and hell.

Then, we have Galileo and the budding of science. The struggle to denounce heliocentrism and its relations to eternity in favor of a more dynamic and less static universe. A universe where the eternal question itself is raised in a sea of fluidity and flux. A start for the question of boundary, uniqueness, and specificity. A place for the river of Heraclitus which can never be stepped in twice and the chaotic boundedness of Anaximander’s:

“Whence things have their origin,

Thence also their destruction happens,

As is the order of things;

For they execute the sentence upon one another

– The condemnation for the crime –

In conformity with the ordinance of Time.” Anaximander

From there we proceed to the dark ages and the resulting conflict of the Royal Society and Alchemy. The Philosopher’s Stone and the transmutation of base metal into gold representing Salvation and transformation and finally clashing with Newton’s absolute time and space and equations of motion. Chemistry replaced and transformed itself from alchemy into a less mystic and more static thought of ‘purely’ physical ‘substance’ (from Latin); compounds interacting in mechanical fashion with predictability and confluence – fluidity in stasis.

Eternal Recurrence of the Same and Chaos in Post Modernity

Now, we look at the stars and think the radical thoughts of Einstein as tame. Time-Space relativity is taken for granted in such a short time from the beginning of the 20^th century when it was deemed as fake science and scientific apostacy from absolute time and space. People do not appreciate what a radical and far-reaching effect Einstein had on culture, religion, and scientific dogma of the day. To think time and space as manifestations of a unitary phenomenon of gravity essentially questioned Eternity and all its historical ramifications. In Einstein, we moved so quickly and almost unnoticed from, once again, stasis
(from Greek stasis “a standing still, a standing; the posture of standing; a position, a point of the compass; position, state, or condition of anything;” also “a party, a company, a sect,” especially one for seditious purposes; related to status “placed,” verbal adjective of histēmi “cause to stand,”) and dynamis
(unaccountable, potency, potential, capacity, ability, power, capability, strength, possibility, force , Aristotle’s potentiality and actuality, also taken as power and force and later into rule, in Latin dunamis is taken as potentiality). -In Greek thought apeiron and peras, the eternal struggle of chaos and order, form and shadow, the real and the possible.

Once again, our Einsteinian cosmos has been challenged by quantum mechanics and gravitational waves. In 1801 Thomas Young demonstrated the wave behavior of light and the resulting paradigm shifts in epochs of scientific history. The double-slit experiment which Richard Feynman demarcated as “a phenomenon which is impossible […] to explain in any classical way” focused intensely on the fundamental nature of stasis and dynamis, particle and wave specifically related to light but having permutations in physics which eventually brought on the demise of the static atom and the rise of subatomic particles. Subatomic particles pop in and out of existence with overtones in philosophy of the play of something and nothing, being and non-being, existence and its impossible Other (Levinas). Once again in a more relevant and profound contemporary setting, we have the one and the many, the same and the other, thesis and antithesis in transformation, the universal and the particular, stasis and dynamis.

To add insult to injury now we have gravitational waves. Just as we were settling into a ‘stasis’ of relative calm now we see that our tamer views of Einstein’s relativity have been liberated from the static deep well of gravity as space and time and gravity itself as the flux of dynamis, fluid dynamics. We now know that space-time is not a well, a dip or a break (as in a black hole) in the fabric of space-time but that the fabric has been pulled away to bring forth a fluidity of ‘substance’ resulting in what I might be extrapolating to be related to the popping in and out of existence of sub-atomic particles.

If space-time is a wave which can account for stasis a calm sea and dynamis a tsunami which breaks the fabric of gravity so extreme that we can hardly think of it as a coherent fabric anymore but more like a well of wonder not so removed from the mysticism of alchemy. Neutrinos are everywhere but extremely difficult to find. Why? Because they are so small that our universe rarely sees them and so electrically neutral that they barely interact with our universe. They fly through the earth as if we did not even exist. They very rarely interact with anything in our universe which makes them extremely hard to detect but we have definitely detected them. They are believed to be created in the fusion of a sun and permeate the universe. They change ‘colors’ in a temporally unexplainable fashion which brings up questions about the absoluteness of the speed of light in a vacuum.

Even more so, we know that dark energy and gravity account for most of the ‘stuff’ of the universe, but we have no idea what it is. There is some speculation that neutrinos may be a variety of a ‘lighter’ version of this dark ‘stuff’. While neutrinos have infinitesimal mass, there are so many of them flying out from suns in fluid dynamics fashion that they can have an effect or possibly in another variety called a graviton create gravity. Perhaps it is easier to think of them as massless particles which is kind of a fancy way of saying pure energy, tiny force fields popping in and out of existence having a ‘real’, actual, static, effect on the perceived universe. However, the dynamics of these tiny forces, perhaps Planch size strings, essentially defy our notions of existence/non-existence, static/dynamic, permanence/impermanence, the one/the many, the particular/the universal and we are left as occupants of a cave which can only perceive shadows of fire light and are haunted by dreams of an exteriority opening up into sun light.

So ‘stuff’ which barely recognizes our universe, our reality ‘comprises our reality’. The mechanical machinations of the 17^th through the 19^th centuries which have solidified themselves into ‘common sense’ and naturalism have been irradicated in this abyss of modernity. What is at question here is the relevance of the ‘real’ to the ‘possible’ and all its associated weightiness in our valuations. The looming philosophical question is the relation of the thematic thesis-antithesis to their transformation and synthesis. Is their relation indeterminate? What is the role of logic in hermeneutically determining their clarity (linguistically, ethnocentrically, historically, etc.) and relevance to each other? Furthermore, what are the ramifications for the history of violence and the State (of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).

Along these lines of inquiry, imagination always hold open a possibility which denies us, our history, and at the same time holds open an unmitigated, unmediated, ag-gnosis of the impossible Other. This Other is not alien although it is unsettling and contrary to our historically contrived sense of well-being which I heretofore simply deem as death. As death in the Orient is the beginning or re-birth; we find an impossibly, irreconcilable, interminable difference (‘differance’ in Derrida) between birth and death, existence and non-existence; all the historic anesthetics we tell ourselves in the ‘common sense’ truths of language. The symbiotic relation of sanity and insanity (as Foucault tells us), logic and contradiction, sense and non-sense have become natural bedfellows in our mortality. However, let us not lose the sense of wonder, beauty, the good beyond being (as Plato tells us). (sophia) Indeterminateness does not have to belong to oblivion necessarily. It may be a recognition of the residue that remains unlocalizable as ‘reality’. The Other may not be our enemy, the death of logic, the nihilism of meaning as in its deprecated common usage. The Other may remain exterior to our determinations of the confluence of the same and the many, stasis and dynamis. The Other may not be consummated in the same logically however, it may give rise to the field in which such determinations are first possible. The problem I think in Levinas given by the horrors of the concentration camps of fascism is that the instigation of the falling away from the infinitude of the Other into the same, totality and infinity, is itself a predetermination/pregiven of the Other which illudes our synchronicities, synchronisms in a symbiotic fashion. As the thought experiment I previously alluded to in the dogma of Christianity: If God thought equality with God was Not-God, not a thing to be grasped but emptied himself to be sin, the son of man, and escape the omnipotence, omnipresent, omniscient of absolute isolation and solitude deemed as eternal hell, who are we to lapse into power relations of godhood, ethnocentrism, nativism, eugenics; the certitude of a demigod?

The certain, fanciful detour of physics and historic metaphor here is simply to bring to light the rhymes of history and language which situate and re-situate themselves again and aging in our determinations, our certainties which as in the Greek notion of chaos circumscribe our forms and from which our forms draw their breath and being. For me, the Other is not a historic, linguistic consequence of a particular history convoluted with the anachronisms of phusis and founding phusis (of origin) but what has always escaped, transformed such determinations of presence and absence. I believe life is fullest when we let the sun fill our fire thrown imaginations on cave walls.

References

sophia. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.plato-dialogues.org/email/950304_1.htm

“Plato didn’t put the one beyond being, but only the good. The one was Plotin’s favorite, not Plato’s.I think the problem is not to look for something “beyond” being, but to stop giving “being” more weight than it has. For Plato, see the Sophist, “being” is the least meaningful of all predicates, as having the greatest extension; anything that can act or be acted upon, being only in my thoughts, has “being”: the “temporary” definition is never reformulated, and holds good till the end. The real problem is not “being”, but “participation”. The question is not “what you are“, but “what you are”; and you are what you become, what you participate in. If the good, and only him, is “beyond being”, it’s because the good is, contrary to being, the most meaningful of predicates, being the perfection of each being, its “telos“, and thus, cannot be one among the being. No more than evil is a “being”, but rather a lack of being, a lack of achievment of what a being is supposed to be, of its “good”. In all that, the “one” is only another name for the “same”, it is what makes each “being” someting, and something different from any other being; different, but not isolated; different, but capable of “participation”… And beware! participation is not only between “material” being and “forms”, but between all sorts of beings, between forms and forms, among others. We have to find out the rules of participation, of “koinônia“, and especially those which make us get along together as rational human “beings”…“

With every breath, the old moment is lost, a new moment arrives. This is something Buddhist meditators know. We breathe in and we breathe out. In so doing, we abide in the ever-changing moment. We learn to welcome and accept this entire process. We exhale, and we let go of the old moment. It is lost to us. In so doing, we let go of the person we used to be. We inhale and breathe in the moment that is becoming. We repeat the process. This is meditation. This is renewal. It is also life. (Das)

Impermanence, anitya, or anicca in Pali, is one of the Buddha’s three marks of existence, three conditions that characterize all of life, and are always present. (The other two marks of existence are anatman (Pali: anatta), or not-self, and duhkha (Pali: dukkha), suffering, or dissatisfaction.) (Unknown)

Teachings in Buddhism tell us of impermanence. In Occidental philosophy we might think the impossibility of presence; to appear, to persist. Yet, there is appearance. So, what gives? This question is again brought to the fore in ancient Greece. Heraclitus tells us we can never step into the same river twice. Anaximander tells us:

“Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
As is the order of things;
For they execute the sentence upon one another
– The condemnation for the crime –
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.” Anaximander [1]

Let’s remember that the three marks of existence are impermanence, not-self and suffering. The word ‘existence’ is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma… a koan in Zen. Existence only has ‘sense’ in coming to presence. What cannot come to presence is not even comprehensible except as the lack of presence (within presence). In appearance there is a retention which presses through in temporality as not only enduring but also necessarily entails a kind of absoluteness upon which sensibility is made possible and persistent. To be and not to be relentlessly announce themselves as existence. They cannot erase themselves. This then is suffering. Suffering has no answer, no solution, except in the impossibility of denying appearance. The ‘it’ of appearance can have the ‘appearance’ of denying itself but in so doing only re-announces itself in its negation. The classic Latin world fitted itself with a ‘metaphysic’ of eternity and substance. This was also its doldrums in the later advents of philosophy and science. Science necessarily proceeds classicism in the de-naturing of presence and has continually brought the mystery of presence into a clarity which dispenses with noble certainties of yesteryear. Over the centuries we have lost the Latin consolidations of absolute certainties by paying close and temporal attention to its content.

Yet, what cannot be unveiled is the pain of loss, of suffering. There is no doubt that suffering and impermanence are inextricably linked. In extinction, Buddhism tells us of the not-self, the erasure of self. But only a self can erase itself. Thus, we have the age-old debate between Buddhism and Hinduism of the Atman (the soul, self) and the Brahman (what I have brought to the fore here as ‘presence’). Buddhism recognizes the not-self as a distinction from Hinduism. The unity of the Atman and Brahman in the Upanishads and Hinduism are irrelevant in Buddhism just as the belief in Christianity is irrelevant to science. Centrality itself is fundamentally questioned and yet, even in this we are still mired in philosophy and the notion of presence. This is why meditation is important in Buddhism. It is the practice of mindfulness. It puts into practice the value of detachment, from attachment to the incessant dilemma of presence. Buddhism, as with better practices in philosophy, deepens the questions of existence. It enriches the value of what cannot come to presence as a reverence and humility which does not totalize. The most knee-jerk reaction to suffering is fear. Fear totalizes as if it were an answer to suffering. In this way, fear loses to richness of life. It reduces and compacts suffering into an easy answer, a fictionalized tradition. However, the absolute as fear or God does violence to the depth of mystery and wonder, the notion of the ‘new’. We are world-weary when the new becomes a replay of the past. We lose our way; we miss the mark. Resistance to pain is suffering.

The tragic loss of my son is pain. It is not erased as long as I am. His death as change is painful. As long as I am, [that] pain is. This is my debt to the obligation I owe him. My debt will never be repaid. It is my homage to his presence and loss of presence. I do not shrink from it in negativity, fear or oblivion but carry it with every step I take as the burden of existence and relatedness, relationship, as what I have/had with him. It is real and deepens with every moment. Every moment carries promise and renewal but also weighs heavily especially as we age. Likewise, the notion of absoluteness, even as the absoluteness of impermanence, is not an escape but a way in, a chance for ‘new’ not yet announced. The death of Chris is the death of me, of us, and the possibility for what is not yet announced or capable of being formulated in presence and absence. This is what Chris was and is. This is what all of us have been or will be. We can shrink from it or let it transform us, deepen us, make us capable for the ‘new’.

The purpose of what has been and will be is what can never be, can never come into presence or be totalized into fear. All of us carry each other in the burden of existence. We can choose to deny this and whither and shrink away into anger, despair, regret and isolation. This avenue denies who we are and what beckons us toward extinction not as release but as fulfillment of all that has been and ever will be which can nonetheless ever be created or made from the presence of existence. The impossibility of existence is not a step into nihilism. It is the occasion of birth. All of our presences and absolutes did not usher us into life before birth as if stepping into a river in which we carried our intentions and conscious from one state to another. We ‘are’ the river which can never be stepped into twice. How appearance ‘is’ is not a question or an answer, it is an occasion for wonder, renewal in a type of ‘new’ which can never be made temporal or a-temporal. It is the possibility of enrichment which can only be nourished by debt and obligation to the other, the presence and absence of the other, in suffering… for the sake of the other which undoes me into the infinite depth of what is not-me, not-self.

References

Das, Lama Surya. Practicing With Loss.

Unknown. What is impermanence?

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[1] See my discussion on Anaximander here.