2.31
Why question wind, why not water, fire, and earth too? The elements — those ‘things’ that make up all other things.
Raising this question allows us to sense how our questions, historico-culturally, tend to point towards what things have in common as their foundation (the smallest units), and how we’ve tried to narrow this down to one single, unchanging thing: a constancy meant to explain and underpin diversity; stability meant to explain and underpin change. It’s apparent that ‘elements,’ which reflect a set of metaphysical commitments, are central to our way of thinking and being.
Let’s observe the ‘elements’ again. Let’s imagine what it was like for the Presocratics, for example, to think about the elements, before we piled all our understanding onto them. — ‘But what’s the point of this activity?’ — The phenomena may shine through and reveal other facets of themselves.
When we spend time with a friend, new aspects are revealed. We’re surprised. — We can’t help but be.
Notice, though, that wind, water, fire, earth, too are concepts. We needn’t think of these as the discrete entities that we do. We needn’t feel as though an instance of fire is a mere particularization or instantiation of a universal, and ‘fire,’ as atomic definitional essence, explains and underpins it.
‘But I don’t understand what you’re hoping we’ll get out of this. Sure, I can go look at a pool of water, or a dirt path, but what am I trying to do?’
Ontological attention is a way of opening to a thing.[1] Opening to a thing is opening to being surprised by it. If we know how things are, then things appear regular and regulated and we notice nothing else, except deviation. The deviation/norm pairing, the subsumption of particulars to generalities or universals, and the lawfulness of nature have informed how nature appears to us.
My call is for a different approach. One part of the method might be imagination (§2.6): imagination can reveal how things touch the world. For example, one could ask how the wind could be otherwise understood: without already knowing what wind is, let it tell you how it is. Observational imagination can be a receptivity to phenomena.
[1] Zwicky, W&M, LH52, LH55, LH 57–8, LH100.