2.87
“This is simply what I do.”[1]
‘Why do you drive on the right side?’
‘Why do you eat with utensils instead of your hands?’
‘Why do you investigate nature through scientific experiment?’
Eventually, we hit bedrock: ‘this is simply what we do.’ I may give reasons, but eventually they move in a circle.
‘But you jump from cultural contingencies to scientific investigation!’
Any practice—broadly construed—is a ‘cultural contingency.’ We want to say scientific investigation isn’t a group practice; but it is.
We want to say that scientific investigation constantly touches the world, whereas the side we drive on or how we eat is convention; while we have reasons for the latter, alternate ways work just as well. But this isn’t right, for we’re always ‘touching’ the world, even with what we call a ‘cultural contingency.’ To eat with utensils isn’t superfluous, an arbitrary exertion of our collective will; it’s intertwined with a whole metaphysics of food, relating to an array of things, such as our body, how we eat, how we divide the day, where and how we sit and with whom. The world speaks to us and we respond in particular ways.
‘This is simply what we do’ doesn’t mean what we do is right. We’re called, we’re put in question, such that we ourselves can question. Our questioning is a response, but an answer doesn’t annul a question: it questions the question. It asks, ‘is this sufficient?’ — There are other ways to answer. There are other ways to do things.
This insufficiency is the condition of meaning. Meaning leaps across the gap, the rift, the schism between things (§2.23). Meaning is when things fit together (§2.12, §2.43), commonality based in difference; meaning beckons across the divide (§2.20), without ever healing it. (Contrary to the fantasies of full communication, full transparency, a dialectic reconciliation.) Thus, meaning is a way of relating to what’s lost and not part of you: what’s dissipating and vulnerable (§2.7).
Because of frailty, we project continuity: “Passive synthesis is of [this] latter kind: it constitutes our habit of living, our expectation that ‘it’ will continue, that one of the two elements will appear after the other [like the pairing of tick-tock], thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case.”[2]
“Hence the psycho-analytic school could venture the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death [sic], or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”[3]
“‘What is the most wondrous thing in the world?’ asks Yama, the Lord of Death. His son, Yudhiṣthira, answers, ‘The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we don’t believe it can happen to us.’”[4]
These quotes apply beyond ourselves, for we project a continuity beyond ourselves to those we love, the shape of the world with which we’re familiar, certain ideals, and so on. This continuity allows us to get on with our day, but at a cost: we drive quickly because we ignore the frailty of things. If we were struck by this frailty, we’d get on with our day, but differently. You must change your life.[5]
Things have meaning because they’re cracked, held to the fire, burning within. When we project continuity, we long to secure ourselves from pain, loss, and death. But though this effort emerges from being rooted in love and frailty, we isolate ourselves from the source: we cover the frailty which covers love and the sense of meaningfulness. To love is to lose (§2.7) — not in the future, for love is to already have lost what you love.
“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. / When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”[6]
‘What we do’ emerges in part from a responsive engagement with love and loss, and is itself always open to further response.
[1] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §217, p. 91.
[2] Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, p. 74.
[3] Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” cited in Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II, Sixth Session, p. 157.
[4] Quote from Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 274. From the Mahabharata, Vana Parva, Yaksha Prashna, s. CCCXI; cited without reference in Joan Halifax, Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2008), p. 6; partially quoted in Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being.
[5] Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, p. 181, cited in Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, RH219.
[6] Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998), p. 29.