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David Levin on the Self, the Seer, and TimeBalder said May 28, 1:50 PM: |
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The seer is, as Heidegger says, exceptional; and what makes the seer's gaze 'exceptional' is precisely the fact that it is neither instrumental nor detached, neither a gaze which sees things in terms of their Zuhandensein (readiness-to-hand), nor a gaze of 'pure seeing,' a seeing of things as Vorhandensein (presence-at-hand), which posits things…as 'sheer perceptual presence,' a 'simple sensory presence of the living present'…
This means that we must also attempt to think aletheia free of the metaphysics of ego-subjects and their objects – a metaphysics which installs them in the objectivity of a linear, serial time order, composed of a succession of self-contained, externally related 'nows.' The seer's vision is 'exceptional' in this regard, for the seer is one who has achieved a certain freedom from this way of thinking and seeing… I agree with Heidegger [that] the 'essence' of our being is to exist as an 'ecstatic inherence in the truth of Being.' But what does this mean in terms of our vision? The sense of 'truth,' here, is of course aletheia. Aletheia is an experience with truth that is radially open to the presencing of the absent, the invisible: it is, in this sense, ecstatic. By contrast, correctness involves an experience with truth that sees it as a posited state; it is a vision of truth which denies shadows, adumbrations, the presencing of the invisible, and unconcealment. It recognizes only two modes of being: Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein – in other words, it can only see totalized presence. The seer's way of seeing is hermeneutical: hermeneutically circumspective. Instead of seeing things one-dimensionally, as most of us do today, in this age of reductionism, his gaze sees things in terms of a hermeneutical 'as.' Just as there are two modes of discourse – the apophantic and the hermeneutical, the assertive and the disclosive, so there are two modes of vision, describable in similar terms. Here is Heidegger's discussion of the different discursive modes in Being and Time:
We should note that Heidegger himself implies the homology between vision and discourse by giving an account of the discourse of the language of vision. Heidegger's analysis continues:
Likewise, the seer's way of seeing things is more primordial than our everyday way: its ecstatic openness, and its corresponding sense of things in the dimensionality of their wholeness, though not understood, and not consciously practiced, by more 'ordinary' mortals, in fact underlies all human perception, and not only that of the seer. This is what I think Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological explorations of perception and its temporality enable us to appreciate. Since the seer's capacity for openness is crucial, here, for our understanding of aletheia as an experience with vision, we must briefly return to the fact that the seer's gaze is not ego-logical. That is to say, it is neither egocentric nor logocentric. As a spiritually developed being, the seer is a self, not an ego. The difference is important, so I will briefly define it. The ego is the self limited to its social identifications: its roles, practices, and socially adaptive routines. The ego is the active pole in a structure of subject and object. The self, however, is not identified with any one structure; structurally speaking, it is a process always open to further structuring. even when the self functions like an ego, it is not totally identified with it. The self is a sense of living in which all identifications are subject to deconstruction. Thus we may say that there is no self in the sense of a substance, a fixed identity, and a rigid closure to processes of change. Instead, there are only different styles, types, and dimensions of experiencing – and different styles, types, and dimensions of integration, unity and coherence. With the emergence of the ego, there is an inevitable agitation of mind: anxieties and tensions determine the shaping of our visual intentionalities; inveterate tendencies prevail, structuring the field of our vision in very rigid, narrow, and restricted ways. Ego-logical vision, an assertive mode of vision, always tends to follow the straight line of desire, the shortest, most direct distance between subject and object. For such a vision, a 'circumspective' experience with aletheia is not possible. Ego-logical vision is adaptively necessary, of course. Without its conformity to 'objective' truth, its relationship to correctness, we mortals could not survive. The ego-logical gaze constitutes the ground of our experience with truth – truth, that is, as correspondence. But the seer has achieved a different vision, and he enjoys a different experience with truth. Without rejecting the ego-logical experience of vision and its corresponding truth, he has chosen to develop his visionary capacities beyond their ego-logical stage. To see aletheically, i.e., to experience aletheia in vision, the seer must learn first of all to relax, to lessen the grip of normal anxieties and tensions. This relaxation will in turn alter the character of her visual intentionality, allowing new and very different tendencies to come into play, and restructuring the visual process, the formation of the visual Gestalt – the figure/ground, center/periphery, focus/diffusion relationships. Without the control, the constant, obsessive monitoring of the ego, the seer's gaze is radically decentered, centered in a calm, more restful, more receptive relationship to the openness of the visual field as a whole. The openness, this visual clearing, is what makes the seer's gaze 'ecstatic' … As Heinz Kohut, American psychoanalyst, once observed, 'Joy relates to experiences of the total self': that is to say, it is both 'cause' and 'effect' of a process of self-development, and is related, in particular, to the self's journey towards an openness that would make it whole. The seer's vision, a vision of the 'essential richness of Being,' is rooted in a joyful experience of living in a 'forgetting' release of the past and an openness to the future. The seer is one who embraces whatever time has to offer. It is not that he knows the future, in a predictive or prophetic sense, although mystification often understands the visionary capacity in this way, but rather that he has developed a deep understanding of our protentional-retentional structuring of time – the structural intertwining of temporal ecstasies – and overcome the psychopathology of egologically centered time-experience. Living thus, the seer's vision is centered in a felt sense of the whole – a felt gathering of time as a whole. The seer has 'already seen' what is yet to happen because she understands the ecstatic intertwining, is free of pathological relationships to time, and is open to whatever may come to pass in the dimensions of the visible. ~ Levin, The Opening of Vision, pp. 460-465 (excerpts) |
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