2.53
‘How can there be better or worse ways of being responsive?’
What could we mean by ‘progress’?
‘To approach the truth of the situation. To get closer to how we should be.’
Well, in that case, I accept progress and it seems to align with Zwicky’s definition of truth (§2.14): “the asymptotic limit of sensitive attempts to be responsible to our actual experience of the world.”[1] Yet, I also accept that we don’t all have the same experience of the world.
‘But there’s that relativism again. ‘Progress’ should capture a sense of movement and gain: it speaks to moving along a particular, better path.’
Yes, progress requires a criterion.
‘And the criterion is technological advance, scientific discovery, or some such thing! You can’t, in good faith, think that people who didn’t even invent the wheel, for instance, are as advanced as us.’
— But what, really, is the wheel for?
Criteria—for ‘progress,’ arguments, and so on—don’t extend outside their context and disclosure.
‘If this is what you think, how could there be better and worse? How can your account differentiate between practices from other disclosures? For it’s not simply that facts are in dispute; the basis for discussion isn’t agreed upon! So, someone could come back and say that they pay attention to the phenomena in exactly the way you’ve described (e.g., §2.49): it’s just a matter of a different way of seeing the world, and their way is just as legitimate as the other. How then can you differentiate? – What you need in order to distinguish is precisely what you’ve denied yourself: a criterion outside of various disclosures. Or, at least, a criterion from within a disclosure that can mediate other disclosures.’
There is an openness to encounter before any encounter. This is an opening from my being to other beings: being-with. This prior openness is a deep affirmation, a deep resonance between my being and others. It’s an affirmation because it says ‘Yes’ to come what may: my being turns openly, affirmatively and in acknowledgement, towards all possible others.
From this openness, I enact a subsequent choice towards overall situations (though it may not be conscious but merely a reaction): I open and affirm again, or I close off and try to deny. The latter is ressentiment.[2]
Finally, there’s an openness to responding to both our own responsiveness and the thing in question. Belonging to any responsiveness is a prior responding. We, therefore, have the opportunity to triply affirm phenomena.
Things can demand attention, and they can demand how that attention is to take form. From one perspective, this demand is antagonistic; from another, it’s soothing. If you sense the call, you can either turn towards or away from it: you respect or slight it. But, let’s disambiguate a term, for either way, you respect it. You respect the call insofar as you’re an opening to it and it’s able to appear; then, you respect it further (do it honour, so to speak) by turning towards it, or you slight it by turning away.
All of this gestures to a way to evaluate claims. — Are they true to one’s experience? – Do they triply affirm, triply respect, the phenomena? While we must slight some phenomena, we can do so respectfully. – Respect: not simply as a host welcoming a guest in, but also as a guest who needs to be welcomed in. We are both guest and host. – The house of being is not in us, not dependent on us: rather, we offer being(s) a kind of house: a place to gather. This doesn’t mean they need us; we, like all beings, offer a crack through which others can shine. – Likewise, things gather us — they offer a place for us to be gathered and shine. Being is a multivariate fractured shining that doesn’t depend on us. It traverses beings in resonant relations.
Therefore, a general ethical stance is one of respect. For one couldn’t be without the world: the world and its things give a place to be.
None of this means that one must or should simply accept everything. Some things don’t offer fruitful resonance. Some things or practices don’t seem to fit. Some responses aren’t respectful. Some practices are limiting.
Mass destruction is not respectful. Some ways of being occlude other ways; they deny them (i.e., they don’t allow them to be, and deny that they even could exist). To think that your way is the only right way is to deny phenomena. To think that technological-capitalistic thinking can resolve our problems is to deny phenomena and perpetrate mass destruction: it occludes resonances and the possibilities of re-finding them. Yes, all ways occlude others—necessarily—but it’s a question of greater or lesser violence, and the style of our respect and response. A good balance, as Zwicky puts it, is to “allow communities of non-humans to shape us at least as much or more than we shape them.”[3] Thus, we should be wary of ressentiment and metaphysics that overlook phenomena or resonant ecologies.
— But does this principle of respect reach outside all disclosures? ——— It is the basis of disclosures themselves. How it’s understood is part of a disclosure. It is part of disclosures in that any disclosure involves openness and a way of adhering. — That’s respect.
[1] Zwicky, W&M, LH102.
[2] Ressentiment, though presented as denial, works by secret affirmation, along byways traced out by Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 84–9.
[3] Jan Zwicky, “Wilderness and Agriculture,” in The Eye in the Thicket, ed. Seán Virgo (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 2002), p. 187–97: see p. 193–4.