2.99
This problem of tethering—the galaxy to the sun, the gods to the polis, psychic forces to the subject—is the problem of reductionism: diverse phenomena are pulled back to a central principle or point.
— Are atoms and quarks the best way to explain the phenomena? For we need to ask: what are the phenomena in question? Let’s take, as example, the claim that this coffee is a particular arrangement of chemicals and, thus, atoms. Well, no, that’s not what this coffee is: this misses something fundamental about the coffee. Is the sun a series of gases and atomic particles? Well, those are aspects of it, but not what the sun is. We avoid reductive interpretations of the sun or the coffee, for they are in this way, but they also are not.
— What about the self? Is the self an atomistic subject? This, too, is reductive: it misses something fundamental about the relationality of the self, the way the self is open before itself: temporally, historically, relationally. What these show is our need—i.e., our felt sense that we need—to ground entities in the smallest possible universal building blocks on top of which everything else (e.g., diversity) is based: i.e., difference emergent upon identity, change on stability, particularity from universality.
— But what about the idea that at the core of our being is pure awareness, and this is what we really are: this is our kernel, our core?
Well, could there be such a ‘thing’? If consciousness is always consciousness of something (i.e., intentionality),[1] then so, too, awareness is always awareness of something.
Perhaps we could infer pure awareness from its effects or ‘process’: we could seek either the condition of possibility for intentionality, or what various instances of intentionality have in common. However, in doing so, we take what is common between instances or experiences and reduce it to some kind of basic ‘stuff.’
Even if we grant that there might be pure awareness, we would need to ask what it is: is it a thing, a set of relations, or something else? For if we’re always aware of something, if we’re always open in our being to other beings, and if we’re always open to temporality, wouldn’t it make more sense if it is a set of relations and not some thing? For it’s always indebted to some other thing, aware of, open to, or related to something else. Awareness is always both conditioned (by others) and conditioning (others). Therefore, awareness is never pure (i.e., unconditioned), and even if we found a pure awareness (through abstraction), for it to be awareness it’d still be relational, and it wouldn’t by itself encapsulate what it is to be aware or be a self, for as abstracted it’d miss too much of the phenomena. Awareness isn’t a core, but, as embodied, it’s something that’s throughout and extending beyond our being.
Would we say that (pure) awareness is permanent/enduring or temporary? If it’s a set of relations, it’d be temporary: relations, as essential to it, aren’t static or settled. Nonetheless, it could be enduring, perhaps not in specificity (because of shifting relations), but in some other way: for example, if we posited something like ‘energy’ as underlying specific manifestations of itself. However, here again we’d be taking ‘energy’ as a reduction of ‘what is common’ between various contexts. In addition, this ‘energetic’ awareness would change so drastically with the loss and changing nature of its relations that it wouldn’t mean much to insist on it enduring. Instead, awareness is temporary through and through: the self is a concrescence or cohesion of forces that exists so long as the forces are related in this way. Let’s call this opening-while-holding-back.
[1] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 33.